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How to make your web pages relevant
Before writing content for your estate agency website, you should have a good idea of the phrases you want to rank in the search engines for. In other words, you will have defined your estate agent keyword strategy. You have to know which searches you want to relevant for before you start to write.
In order to rank for a particular phrase like “property in Brittany”, you first need to include the phrase on your pages. This is the first step but there are five main relevancy factors that search engines like Google will consider:
- The words you use on the page
- The position of the words on the page
- Importance that you assign to the words
- The theme of the website the page is on
- The size of the website the page is on
I have excluded inbound links in this article. This is by the far the most important factor but we deal with this in many other areas of the site.
The words you use
When you write copy for your website, the most important thing is to
write for your audience. If your copy does not make sense and is overly stuffed with keywords, for example “buy sell property villas Spain”, users will likely not trust you and will leave your site without contacting you. You should find that when you write naturally, your copy contains the key phrases you have identified as part of your keyword strategy anyway. The important bit is making sure you put the most important words in the most prominent places.
Position of keywords
Search engines will assign more importance to words dependant on where they are positioned on the page. Generally, the higher up the page the better. If you are trying to compete on a phrase, you should mention it naturally in your first fifty words and mention it in the article title or page title. You should also put a version of the phrase in your meta page title, which is displayed in the search results. Always mix things up and make them look natural though. For example, if I was creating a page optimised for the phrase “Marbella Property”, I might write an article on great property deals under €300,000 in Marbella.
Meta page title: Marbella Property – Best deals for under 300,000 euros
Article title: Marbella Property – Best properties for under €300,000
First sentence: “The Marbella property market has experienced higher than average growth over the past year but there are still bargains to be found for those willing to look…”
An article like this would be useful to potential clients and is optimised for the phrase “Marbella property”.
Importance that you assign to words
When you write a document in Word, you naturally give some words more prominence than others by bolding and italicising, or by creating bullet points. Search engines know this and give greater priority to words which have certain html code around them. The most important ones are:
- <anchor> - use relevant words in your internal links - search engines place extra weight on link text
- <H1> - tag for main title of your document
- <H2> - tag for sub-titles of your document
- <strong> - the bold tag
- <em> - the italic tag
- <li> - tag for bullet points
You will often create these tags automatically using a content management system on the back-end of your website. However, they vary hugely in how cleanly they write html code. It can be worth going in and manually cleaning it up if you have html skills.
Website theme and information architecture
The information architecture (IA) of your website defines how you organise and categorise your content. It is very important because it both helps users understand what your site is about and helps them to navigate around it. Your IA is usually ordered hierarchically. In our example above, we might have sub-levels below “Marbella Property” like this:
Marbella Property
1 bed properties
2 bed properties
etc
Search engines use this information to determine how relevant your site and your pages are to a search query. Generally the more local your theme, the better chance you stand to rank. See our example in
The Search High Street.
Big is beautiful
I like my websites like I like my women……No wait a minute, let’s try another analogy...
Size matters if you’ll excuse the pun. If Google has to choose between a site with 20 pages all relevant to “property in Brittany” and one with 300, it will return the larger site first. Write more content, source more property (or get more instructions if you work domestically). Build scale. It’s important in most businesses and it is just as important on the web.