As you can see from the image shown below and by visiting the website, you will see that the homepage is completely different to our other partners websites. The emphasis of the end user typing in their desired flat or house share location has been moved further down the page and has been replaced with a map of the UK with direct links to the main flatsharing cities in the UK. This to date is a unique method of designing the homepage and one that we like.

To promote the website and improve search engine positions, the owner of Flatseeker has created a Twitter account and included serveral pages of flatsharing information on their website – this is something that we would advise all of our partners to do to increase search engine positions and visibility for potential flatseekers.

Flatmates.co.uk is owned and designed by the same team that run the UK’s largest independent classified ads website, Freeads. After expanding the Freeads with localised version, the team saw the white label flatshare system as a perfect opportunity to expand their current offering to their existing client base.

This is a particularly good time to launch such a website as UCAS, the organisation responsible for managing higher education applications, announced earlier this year that 2009 saw an increase in the number of students given places.  In addition, from here until the new academic year in September, current students are continually looking for somewhere to live in 2010 / 2011.

How does it work?
You register an account, set up your profile and you can begin tweeting about your flat share website.  If you are going to use Twitter as a tool to promote your flat share website, it is advisable that your account name reflects your website.

Now you can begin networking by following people with similar interests to yours as they can find you.

How can I use it to promote my flatshare website?
Twitter can be used as a tool to bring awareness to your website and help you communicate with your existing customers whilst sourcing new ones too.

When you register your account, choose a name which reflects either the flat share industry or preferably your websites name as this will make people aware of your name and recognise it when they see it.

Create your profile.
This is done through the Settings button at the top of the page.

You must include the URL of your flat share website which you are promoting as this will be prominently featured on your profile page and is the link between your Twitter page and your website.

In the One Line Bio field, concisely (160 characters to be exact) explain what your website does.  Try to include keywords which will result in your Twitter page showing up in relevant searches.

Do not tick the Protect My Tweets button as this will limit who can see your tweets and will be removed from the public timeline, which will result in you missing potential traffic to your website.

Picture tab
It is advisable to add a picture of your flat share website’s logo, this will make your tweets identifiable to your followers and helps create that brand identity. Remember that your image will be very small on the page so choose something that will be clear and easily identifiable to your followers.

Design tab
Adding a theme to your background can make your Twitter page more appealing to those that visit it. You can begin by using one of the predefined Twitter designs, but consider creating your own background which incorporates either your logo or reflects the flat share industry.

For more information and ideas on this, you can visit websites such as TwitterImage.com

Connections tab
Twitter now allows you to connect to blog or Facebook account, so that any posts made on these are directly displayed as Tweets. The advantage of this is that you can update one and your Twitter is automatically updated making it slightly more time saving for you.

Start Tweeting
Once your profile page is set up, you are ready to begin networking and tweeting. Do not expect results overnight, although you may have a surge at the beginning, Twitter is a tool with long term benefits as opposed to short term gains.

Twitter is all about being interactive, so start following people and making connections, one way to begin is to use the search to find people with an interest in your industry or who have mentioned it in their tweets. If someone starts following you, Twitter “etiquette” is to say thank you.

Balance
Make the most of Twitter by getting the name of your flat share website out there to as many as people as possible, but keep their interest engaged by posting regular tweets. Build in time to check your Twitter account each day, but make sure that it doesn’t start to rule your life!

A balance is needed so that you don’t “over tweet,” send spam like messages or send the same tweet more than once on a regular basis. This will become annoying to your followers who consequently may stop following you.

Keep in mind though, that people have started following you and should expect you to promote your website, so perhaps you could send a daily tweet highlighting a special offer that you have or something that would be of particular interest on specific days.

And when you tweet, do not write the whole message in block capitals.

Building credibility
Building your credibility can increase the number of followers which you receive, which in turn generates more traffic to your website.  This can be done a manner of ways, but tweeting about the flat shares in general or someone else’s website (in a favourable light) are two good methods.

Once your credibility is established, people may use you as a source and a go to for information and their flat share needs – this is good.

Short URLs
With a limitation to the number of characters that you can use in each tweet, adding links to specific pages on websites can easily eat up your allocation.  This is why companies such as www.clicky.at allow you to turn a conventional URL, such as, http://www.whitelabelflatshare.co.uk/content/website_owners (59 characters) into a much shorter link to your desired web page – http://clicky.at/eb7w8t (23 Characters).

Promote your blog
If you run a blog in conjunction with your flat share website, you can utilise Twitter to tell your followers and others that you have a new blog post.  This can help draw additional traffic to your blog and hopefully from there, your website too.

Link to your website
The reason for signing up with a Twitter account is to drive traffic to your website, therefore include a link to your website in some of the tweets that you write, whether that is to the homepage or a specific page that you make reference to.

If you don’t include a link to your website, ensure that your tweet is something of value to them about your website or the flat share industry so that it encourages them to click onto your website to find out more information.

Additional Tools
Since the start of Twitter, a plethora of additional marketing tools and add on’s at your disposal to help you manage your Twitter account.

TweetDeck.com
TweetDeck is “your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter.” It opens as a desktop application that you allows you to monitor your followers tweets whilst also allowing you to set it up so you can see when someone uses your keywords (or your websites name) in their tweets too.

TweetScan.com
Similar to TweetDeck.com, TweetScan searches for your flat share related keywords in peoples Tweets. If you use your keywords, you can see what people are tweeting about and if relevant, you can point them in the direction of your Twitter page and website.

Clicky.at
Mentioned previously, this website allows for you to shorten the length of your URL which is beneficial for when you add a link to your website or blog.

So you now have a basic knowledge of how to utilise Twitter to help promote your website, so good luck and happy tweeting!

Further Reading
Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

Dominate Your Market with Twitter

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

You can follow WhiteLabelFlatshare.co.uk on Twitter too.  Just go to… Twitter.com/flatshares

To improve search engine rankings, this partner has included content on topics such as how to give your bedroom a makeover on a budget, things to do in the capital for free and information on getting around London. These articles give the partner the opportunity to increase the density of the keywords which they want to rank well for.

The design of the website is unique and very different to our other partner websites. The clean design is reflective of the partners other website, Commutee.com which is aimed at connecting commuters via the power of Twitter.

Firstly we have added a “Meta HTML” field to the header / footer section so that you can include your own meta tags etc.

Next up we have the ability to upload ICO files, which along with the “Meta HTML” field allows you to have your own Favicon.

Lastly the HTML editing areas have been updated so that you can enlarge them for easy editing, whilst also being able to double-click to select text, copy/paste etc.

All these new features help make our system one of the best White Label systems out there! If you have any ideas on how to make our system even better please let us know.

We made it through relatively unscathed. As predicted Simon and Glenn completed the run barely breaking a sweat whilst Neil struggled with keeping up the pace and resorted to walking the last 2km, only picking up the pace for the finish line!

To date, we have collectively raised over £200 for this great charity that relies on donations to continue its work caring for individuals and their families that have been affected by cancer and other life changing illnesses all for free.

The start of the Santa Fun Run 2009

Going past the start line

Three tired Santa

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is primarily about creating content and obtaining back links from other websites to improve your websites position in search engines for relevant searches and is fundamental to promoting your flatshare website at no cost. It is also a means of driving extra traffic to your website which potentially means more registrations, more payment upgrades and ultimately more commission for you!

There are three phases to getting your flatshare website up the rankings in Google and Bing. These are keyword research, on site optimisation and off site optimisation.

Keywords Research

The first stage to optimise your flatshare website is to research and generate a list of the keywords that you want to rank highly for. The best place to start creating your list is by grabbing a pen and paper and writing down the words and phrases that you think people looking for a general or niche flatshare website (depending on which yours is) type into the likes of Google. From here, we would recommend putting these into a keyword generator tool such as the Google Keyword Tool or Market Samurai to give you more ideas.

Generally you want to be looking for a mixture of short keywords and phrases such as flatshares, flat share in London and long tail key phrases such as double room available in flat share in London. The short keywords will be searched for more frequently, but competition will be high, whilst the long tail words receive fewer searches but there is greater chance that you will rank highly for them.

On Site Optimisation

The second stage is on site optimisation which is about what you can do to your website that will influence how you rank in search engines for flatshare related searches. There are three things that you can do here to optimise your website:

• When writing any content on your website, keep your keywords and phrases in mind and try and fit them into the copy as often as possible. But remember that the end user is human and poor English skills will probably make them turn back and look at another website. You dominantly want to focus on getting four or five terms site wide and using others on specific pages, what the search engines are looking for is how often the keyword or phrase is used, where it is in relation to other keywords and phrases and where the word or phrase is used in a sentence – those words or phrases at the beginning of a sentence are given more weighting than those used towards the end.
• Although Google openly states that they do not put much weighting on meta tags (page title, description and keywords), it is important that they are used and filled in correctly.
  • Your page title should be a summary of the webpage that the user is viewing and contain your most important keywords.
  • The page description should describe the content that is on the specific page that the user is viewing.
  • Your keywords list should be different for every webpage and incorporate your main keywords with the content that is on the webpage. It is important not to include more than 35 keywords or phrases.
• The final thing that to look at with on site optimisation of your flat share website is how it is structured. The internal links within your website hold more SEO value than you may realise. If you have a link within your copy try to have the link on a relevant keyword, but remember that moderation is critical here, too many pages links and the pages looks silly and puts people off.

Off Site Optimisation

The final stage of search optimising your website is the things that you can do on other websites that will influence your search engine ranking. This mainly focuses on building back links which are links from related websites to yours. The main things to remember here are that quality links (i.e. relevance to your flatshare website and their Page Rank) have far greater influence than quantity. Building links can be a time consuming job, but the more high quality links that you obtain, the higher your position in search engine, so avoid wasting your time on submitting your website on directories as search engines typically don’t value these links.

If you have any questions or want to know more about SEO, chat to us on live chat and we’ll do our best to answer your questions

The addition of Rooms.co.uk means that our tally of live white label flatshare websites is now firmly into double figures, which is quite impressive since the system has only been available since mid-September and we have many more to come still.

After the success of their initial whitel label flatshare website, Weekday Flatshare, this partner has decided to create a general flat and house share website as opposed to targeting a specific nieche market.

ShareBuddy.co.uk has chosen to utilise social networking websites to help promote the website and communicate with its customers. They can be followed on Twitter and you can become a fan on Facebook.