To make the most potential from your flatshare website you will need to get as much relevant traffic as possible. There are many ways of achieving this but the most effective method is by optimising your website for search engines.
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
