SEO | Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

York letting agents City Lets, one of our growing number of property clients, are now enjoying a feature on their website that allows their properties to be featured on a range of other websites in addition to on their own.

National property portals such as Rightmove, PropertyLive and Fish4 are well advertised and receive a huge amount of web traffic. City Lets had been advertising their catalogue on some of these portals by manually maintaining the details of each property. A time-consuming task, given that the data essentially replicates the content of their website.

So the solution is obvious: have our website database automatically keep the national property portals up-to-date on the latest changes.

Setting up the feeds wasn’t as straightforward as you might hope: of course, the various portals have a range of wonderfully incompatible specifications for data transfer, but that’s the kind of problems we get paid to sort out.

So, our brand spanking new server (which Andy will be telling you all about soon enough) gathers all the data together every night and uploads it all to Rightmove, PropertyLive, Zoopla! and (coming soon:) Fish4.

This means much broader publicity for all City Lets properties, and City Lets save a heck of a lot of time by not having to maintain their catalogue manually.

In other City Lets news, they are also currently promoting their York serviced apartments service, so this has meant some new SEO adjustments to give the relevant pages on the site a boost for search phrases related to this.

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We’ve had several new SEO clients recently – the latest SEO project to be completed was some off-site optimisation for online estate agents Upping Sticks.

Although we have a growing number of estate and letting agents’ websites in our portfolio, this is the first company we’ve worked for that operates entirely as an online estate agent rather than having physical premises. Their decreased overheads mean that they will charge a low cost fixed fee to sell your home online, and rather than operating over a localised geographical area, they cover the whole of the UK.

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process whereby websites are modified in order to achieve a higher position in Internet search results.

The higher a website appears in search engine results the greater the number of visitors.

For example: a builder located in York would like to be at the top of Google for “York builders”, “builder in York”,  “building contractor York” and similar searches.  The builder also has other phrases for which they would like a high position:  “house extensions in York”, “York attic conversions”, “property renovation York” and so on.  The builder also operates in nearby locations: Leeds, Harrogate, Hull etc. and would like high positions in Google for these localities too. (more…)

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Recently we’ve been doing some SEO for web analytics consultants Applied Web Analytics. They aim to increase their clients’ website sales by gaining an understanding of what visitors experience while on the site, using a range of tools and tests to find and fix any problems. This site was designed by Spyre and coded by Semlyen IT.

Another new site undergoing some off-site SEO treatment is for the Haxby Group Medical Practice, who are based in the outskirts of York but are now extending and will have doctors in Hull at three new surgeries opening between autumn and Christmas 2009. This site was designed by Mode and coded by Semlyen IT.

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We manage quite a lot of sites related to property services, and have several sites for letting agents, estate agents, builders and surveyors in our portfolio.

Recent additions to this list include a website for a holiday cottage in the Hebrides – Caberfeidh Cottage on the Isle of Lewis.

We are also working on a website for Honeybourne Homes – York builders who specialise in building new bespoke houses of high quality in the North Yorkshire area.

There’s the chance to win a house in Leeds at www.winmyfirsthouse.com. The competition is also raising money for the not-for-profit organisation Virtue Youth, which was set up to help disadvantaged young people.

We are doing some SEO work to promote a mini-site that is part of York interior designer Tricia Douglas’ site: Instant Interiors is a landlord furniture package service in which Tricia quickly provides complete interiors for rental houses, show homes and letting agents.

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