Is anyone good with websites??

Hi Sorry its been a while since I have been on, I have been keeping up with the forum though from home, we returned back to the UK in Oct last year only to be made redundant again at Christmas so we headed back to Spain in March for good this time, with no ties to the UK with work now I am happy to say we are staying here for the forseeable future. I have just set up a new Property Management Business (Oh no another I hear you cry) Don't worry I am not one of those who has just stepped off the plane and decided to "give it a go" I managed two estate agents in the UK ,with qualifications and 10 years experience I hope to be more proffessional and bring a better customer service level to my clients than some agents I came across last year. With no redundancy money (long story) I am having to set up on a small budget and have designed and published my own website (for now) but I am struggleing to get my website found on the major search engines i.e Google, Yahoo and such and I was wondering if anyone knows roughly how long it tales to be found by the so called googlebot? Or is there anything I should be doing?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

a very good product to use is ibusiness promoter which I think costs about EUR250

http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/

also you are best to do your own SEO (search engine optimisation)

BUT it does take a lot of time.

and don't forget no substitute for word of mouth!!

But if you do go this route you will gain skills and you can move in that direction also. I know an estate agent who makes some money out of website design - keeps the roof over his head!

 Sent you a private message SEAK

Concentrate on your SEO, keywords and content. Tell Google you are there by registering with Google tools and adding the code. Don't forget to upload a sitemap of all your pages as well. Link with other sites relevant to yours but try to avoid sites that ask for payment to link and sites seen as link farms for spammers.

Mark

Yeah but you have to consider monthly fees.

and also you need to keep tweaking site to keep up to speed with changing rules of google/yahoo.

Olley - are you associated with this company?

Hi Thank you all, unfortunately due to my low budget I won't be able to opt for any of the replys that get companies to promote it for me :(  with regards to Markfish's post what is a SEO? sorry to sound dim.

I thought it might have been the case regarding it being a competative field but even when I type in my full webiste address in the google search it still doesn't find my website.

I am hoping as you said earlier that word of mouth will also help my profile but its so frustrating when you are trying to get a business off the ground on a budget. I realise that most wouldn't even try on such a low budget but due to unforseen circumstances and a matter of survival in these bad times I am determined not to be another statistic to the dole que!

Any other suggestions welcome, Thanks

 SEO = Search Engine Optimisation.  Most people optimise for Google, but there are other search engines. My site shows on page 3 of Google for one set of keywords, but is the second result on Bing's first page!!

There was a downloadable booklet available from EOS last year about SEO and how to do it, cost about 20€ I think and was interesting reading. You may fnd it if you use the "throw a 6 to start" search system or Justin may pop in and tell you where to find it. 

Mark

SEO is search engine optimisation and that's what it's all about.

There is another product called WEBCEO and I think they have a free version

http://www.webceo.com/?source=Partners

Also do some google research on SEO techniques

and stay away from adwords and sponsored links etc until you have sorted your site.

Check out webmonkey dot com for free tips, ideas and scripts.

I dabbled a bit in web design many years ago and from what I can remember you need to put your "words for search engine otimisation" in your meta tags .... these are then picked up first  by google/search engines etc ... , etc etc

If you have a look at a website similar to yours and from the top of the web page select "view" then "source" you should be able to tell where to put your meta tags... it's up at the top somewhere....

'hope this helps - it's been a while since I've actually published anything live!

When I started out online 8 years ago it was really easy to get a website on page 1 of Google.  Today, things have moved on a lot and it is much more difficult and time consuming.

Today it's much more about the number and quality of links pointing to your site rather than what you put in tags and stuff.

Google has a good beginners guide to SEO that you can download here.  It's in PDF format and will give you a good idea of how to get started.

It's a lot of work but it is worth it and it is something you can do youself.

Justin

Hi I will make a cup of tea and have a good read through all you have posted ,Thank you. I think my problem is my host provided a free website maker which I decided to use until I am set up properly just to get me on the web for now and it does not let you edit the actual http text its more of a webbuilder page where you type direct onto the site page and then publish (if that makes sense) i have been trying to get into the web text so I can add the google verification but have had no luck yet and it gets so confusing with all the so called help pages on the site.

I have purchased a website package but have not even managed to open it yet as it involved downloading wordpress which is mind boggling, I am starting to greatly respect web designers and am also wishing I just had the money to let someone who knows what they are doing do the job, now if you ask me about property i am right up there but this http stuff is harder than people think! (or at least thats what i keep telling myself)

Thanks again I will keep you posted (or not as the case might be)

Beat of luck with it.  It will all make sense as you go through it.

If you have any questions let us know and we'll try and help.

Justin

I know this is a bit of an old thread but just in case anyone else needs a website and they are on a tight budget. Check out google for Designers For Hire and you will find there are many designers in India. You can save nearly 70% against what local or UK based designers charge.

If you can then have a go yourself there are some great tutorials out there and if your using something like wordpress you can buy a template from alot of different real estate sites for around 40USD and then amend to your specifications.

In the end I have designed my own site and its taken me a couple of months with all the reading and experimenting etc but dont make your site look like it was put together by a kid with animated gifs, different fonts, and pictures that would take an enternity to load on dial up (yep some people even in UK still use dial up).

If your building your own site dont let people see it in a mess, put up a maintenance page with a brief outline of what you are going to be offering also think about a PDF brochure and stick that up so people can check out everything and maybe even create a twitter link and update it regulary with information about how the site is going, new things you may be going to offer.