You have your first real estate agent as a customer or you are an agent yourself and want to build up your own website for your company? Then you will eventually come across content management systems, such as WordPress. With content management systems like WordPress or plugins and extensions, you can build your own website today, with a lot of practice and diligence, and save a lot of money compared to an advertising agency. For those who have fun with the subject matter itself or those who run a small advertising agency and build their first real estate portal or first real estate agent site, this tutorial is just right. Whether real estate portal, house sale or real estate evaluation – real estate agents have a hard job: We help today free of charge to create exposés.
Many sites fail because the visitors they attract do not feel 100% comfortable. This may be due to the fact that the images are not compressed and a page takes 30 or 40 seconds to load. Especially in rural areas, where there is no fast internet connection, loading photos with a large file size and maybe an additional video can quickly paralyze the computer. Of course, you don’t wait forever but simply switch to another page. You must prevent this termination!
There are several ways to reduce the abort rate. You can find some important information and videos in my blog or on my YouTube channel.
Today we will take a special look at the topic of compression and inclusion with aspects of search engine optimization.
Before we can even begin to build our site, we need to make sure that any real estate elements output through our WordPress themes are well formatted. This means that the CSS of the WordPress theme is written so that every photo, no matter how it is uploaded, is always output correctly. In practice, however, this may not work, because you may also take portrait photos, for example. Portraits in photos are then automatically centered in the middle and thus do not show the image section you originally intended for the project. Another important point is that sliders are often used in individual property listings. Again, this is again designed to a certain size, so that they are played correctly on all devices, from notebook to desktop to tablet or smartphone.
So how do we guarantee a good function?
For every new real estate advertisement and every new photo of an apartment or house, there must be a uniform format. All photos will be cropped to this format before they are imported into the WordPress system.
What are the advantages?
Same layout on all pages and individual pages
Compressed photos for fast loading times
Search engine optimized file names
The more similar the elements are, the higher the quality of a website. High quality websites are a guarantee and for us there are good sales. Therefore you should pay attention to such details from the very beginning. Once you have established such a template in your company, your employees or yourself can fall back on it at any time. This will save you a lot of time and personnel costs afterwards and will lead to higher sales. Your website will also be better rated by the search engines, as the time spent on your website usually increases when the design elements are perfectly suited. That is why we focus on the creation of the advertisement.
Each photo camera has in principle two formats with which you can take pictures. You can easily change this in the settings, no matter if Canon, Sony or other camera manufacturers. It is important to decide only for one format. Which format comes from the camera is usually not that important. What is important is that it is now correctly entered in the Photoshop template.
Video Tutorial – How it works
Photoshop file template
Now that we have learned all the important things about the reason for the optimization, we can take a closer look at the Photoshop template. Of course, as always, this template is available for free download, for real estate agents, advertising agencies and media managers.
Both Photoshop files are already set to a smaller format, with a maximum width of 1920 and 2000 pixels respectively. So your photos are still large enough for a visitor to view them on the computer at full resolution. Just download the Photoshop file.
After you have taken the pictures, all you have to do is drag the pictures from the memory card to your computer. To do this, simply insert your SD Memory Card into the appropriate slot of your computer or card reader. A file folder will already open and from there you can drag the pictures into your Photoshop file. Proceed as follows:
Activate card reader or insert SD card directly into the computer
Open folder with image files and make selection
Reduction of the images with shortcut
Since all your images are in the same format, as you can see in the tutorial video, you can zoom in or out all your images at the same time. To do this, select all layers, start with the first one and press the mouse on the last layer while holding down the Shift key. In the following step press Ctrl+T to get to the transformation model. This sounds complex at first, but it is actually quite simple, to enlarge or reduce the images. Always make sure that you only drag the images at the edges, not at the sides. To do this, always press the Shift key. This will enlarge or reduce the images proportionally. The format is not distorted. Here once again summarized
Confirm with Enter to place the images
If all images are stored, select the layers and press Ctrl+T
.
Now scale the images in size while holding down the Shift key
Compressed saving for web and devices
Now we come to saving the images for our real estate ad. Here comes the clou, save your photos always compressed. While a photo in the same format without compression still loosely 1.5 MB, we can compress it by 60 to 80%, maybe even from 200 to 300 KB.
To do this, simply select File in Photoshop and Save for Web and Devices in Photoshop under the Cloud version. Here you only need to make the following settings
Output – JPEG
Compression Quality – 50%
The next step is about assigning the file name, here too you can do a little bit to optimize your rankings.
Search engine optimized file names naming
When you assign a file name, be careful not to use the file name formatting of your camera. Cameras only output numbered images, so they cannot describe what emotions an image reflects or what objects or locations are hidden in it. That’s why we rename our images and name them instead of the standard output:
DCIM45592.JPEG
We do this with all photos of our current property and vary the individual files depending on what is shown in the picture. The prefix with the respective real estate object, location and district remains the same.
Insert in WordPress
We did it! Now we have prepared our new real estate homepage perfectly and have not only a beautiful WordPress theme but also perfect pictures that look the same on every page. Instead of landscape and portrait format we only use landscape pictures and of course all are compressed and optimized by the file name for the search engine.
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SEO: Video Tips
Learn search engine optimization and software! Whenever there is some time in the evening in the agency, I make explanatory videos about social media marketing, Photoshop but also search engine optimization. A few free SEO Life Hacks on our agency. What does a good SEO optimization cost? Nothing, if you do it yourself! As I have already shown in my Youtube channel and in many blog posts, you can build your own big sites especially with WordPress, even whole online shops with strong performance.
/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/social-media-one-logo-tiktok-instagram-youtube-facebook-marketing.svg00Laura/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/social-media-one-logo-tiktok-instagram-youtube-facebook-marketing.svgLaura2018-12-18 14:01:092021-04-07 18:49:47Optimise real estate advertisements: Photoshop, WordPress and SEO – Video Tutorial
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