A Brief Description of SEO and SEM

If you want your business to be successful online you must get visitors to your website. Not just any visitors however, you need targeted visitors and you need a great deal of it. Among the best techniques for getting targeted visitors is from the various search engines and social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook which are very popular in South Africa and around the world. If someone types a keyword into a search engine they are looking for specific information so if your web site appears within the results you will have a pretty good chance at getting a very targeted visitor to your site. But exactly how does one ensure that your website is the one that comes up in the search engines? That’s where SEO or search engine optimization enters the picture.
Search engine optimization can be explained as employing a number of strategies to get your site ranking higher in the search engines for particular phrases. Effective search engine optimization should always begin with good key-phrase research. You must make an effort to optimize your web site for key terms that folks actually are trying to find in sufficient quantities but also key terms that are not so competitive that it’s going to be nearly impossible to rank for them.

This is where Website Analytics comes into our strategy for you. The analytics of what is going on ‘behind the scenes’ of the website is monitored by your webmaster and relevant alterations are made to keep your Websites Up-to-date with (or rather aiming to be ahead of) other websites in your area. There are many Companies around that help/sell these strategies. We would like to inform you of what it is you will get when subscribing to an AIDA Office Website and not be left alone in the dark and unaware of what it is that promotes websites and will get you on top with the Search Engine Results. We exclusively cater for Google Search Engine since recent statistics show that 55.98% of our visits on the National website since November 3rd 2010 is coming from Search Engines and 51.92% from Google alone. Therefore that 4% other search engines is not Priority to us and will to be attended to, since Google is South Africa’s leading Search engine when it comes to Real Estate (as many other industries).

The route that AIDA is going with the Website Strategy is to get a Website to represent each area/ city we are painting red. That websites will be linked directly to a provincial and the national website in a Spider-Web-like structure with each website linking back and forth, from and towards all the websites in the network. This strategy promotes all the websites and increases availability of AIDA Websites in search engine results.

One of the most important parts of a website is the URL (the name of your website). Explaining this very briefly, a website called www.aidaptaproperties.co.za will show as a good result when searching for keywords such as pta, aida and properties even before any code, keywords and info on the website is being looked at. In the case of www.pretoriaproperties.co or www.pretoriaproperties.co.za obviously the keywords when searching for Pretoria and Properties it will most definitely be more available in Search Engine Results.
Having one of these domains in our possession is important and would help you as an office with viewers to your office website as well as our National and Provincial websites.
SEO is very closely associated with another term, SEM or Search Engine Marketing. This is the practice of promoting your business using the major search engines, seeking to get targeted visitors to your website by ranking for your carefully selected keywords. Smart business people know that getting their goods or services in front of these types of targeted visitors boosts conversions and higher conversions means more money.


We have already explained the importance of choosing the right key terms but there is a lot more to SEO and SEM than just choosing the right key terms. That is only the beginning. The tasks you will need to complete can fall into two categories, one is called on-page search engine optimization which would be the steps you can take on your website that the major search engines want to see and off page SEO which is in essence getting back-links directed to your website from other websites. These one way links behave as a vote of confidence for your own website and the greater the number of back-links you can acquire and the better the calibre of those links the better.
There is much more to ranking highly in the search engines than I can talk about in this brief article and in reality learning proper Search engine optimisation usually takes quite a long time.
With all this said. Yes, it is very important to have SEO in place within your website and to update your website almost daily with new stock or info relevant to the Real Estate industry and or your area/city. And Yes, it might easily become very expensive to have and maintain this type of websites. Although there are many offices owning additional websites we would like you to consider having a AIDA Office website which is integrated with Our Listing Managing System (Prima List) and other AIDA Websites. Should you require more than what we offer and have other websites out of the AIDA arrangements, it will be on your own account.
In the case of websites being more available and having more ‘windows’ to connect your office and agents to is important. Less is not more in this case, thus we try feed and post our information to most of the South African Property Portals and websites available.
For any website questions and enquiries regarding your office websites you may contact me
Jaco Smit (AIDA Webmaster) at
012 6829600 or email jaco@aidasa.co.za