Link Building Strategies For Real Estate Websites

by Joe

building-linksReal estate websites hoping to compete and rank in search engine results for their local keywords and phrases definitely need to address the issue of building links. This is even more important if you happen to compete in a busy online marketplace crowded with many website competitors, where great website domain age and SEO content might not be enough to reach those coveted page #1 results. Search engines read quality links as a indicators of website popularity, as ‘votes’ from external sources as opposed to self-promotion, and in this light links provide another valuable metric for search engines to use when determining their natural ranking results. In addition, quality  links can drive a lot of traffic to your site just from their appearance on already popular websites, as you can imagine the traffic stream that might come from your website being mentioned in a Realtor.com article or local online newspaper. There are a variety of ways and means to accumulating quality links (ones that are inbound, and one-way), to your Realtor or real estate office website. The overview below will point you in the right direction.

Link Building Strategies Start With Your Website Itself

On-site and on-page link building is the first place to start when thinking about the link profile of your website. That means creating a website architecture and properly linked-together website that showcases your best content to the search engines. Make sure your most valuable content (content that is original and relevant to real estate in your local market) is linked to from the homepage, and is not buried too deeply within the site. Until you have a lot of content on the website, you don’t want to have more than a couple of layers of “depth” to it, meaning that people should have to click on or two times at the most to find any content on your site. When you do connect your content pages to the site, connect these pages together intuitively and use proper and descriptive anchor text in those links. Helping the usability and interconnectedness of your website will push the right pages into your audience’s view, and will in turn help facilitate the natural inbound linking that happens to quality content pages over time. This is because people will be able to more easily find your content and refer to it later.

External Link Building Strategies And Tips

Links = votes for your website, but a nytimes.com link is going to be vastly more valuable than a link from your personal Myspace page. Not all link votes are created equal. Trusted domains, websites with high Pagerank, websites with high relevance to your industry (real estate) are the types of online sources you should hope to attract. Here are a few ideas to seek and find those quality links:

  • Submit your website to high value directories such as Yahoo Directory, Business.com and BestoftheWeb. These are widely recognized as solid link building vehicles for your site. Some directories are paid and some are free. Look for directory sites with decent Pagerank and also ones related to your business/industry.

  • Write content for other websites, article submission websites, anywhere of relevance online that is looking for and will accept the content you provide. It’s important to remember the guidelines of using proper anchor text and linking to the best pages on your website.

  • Call, email, write letters to webmasters of related websites to be included on their websites. The grassroots, DIY work ethic is alive and well online, and although a more labor intensive method you can get great results when done effectively.

Test The Effectiveness Of Your Link Building Strategies

There are wide host of other effective link building strategies out there, and the few tips above really just scratch the surface of how those strategies work. However you start your link building campaign, it is important to gauge the effectiveness of that work. Check your web statistics to look for upticks in monthly audience and traffic and also the referring websites coming to you. Install Google Analytics on your site. Check your search engine rankings for the terms you’ve targeted in your campaign and see if those have increased in position. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to search for Inlinks.

You are now on your way to a coherent and effective link building strategy. Keep it tuned to www.RealEstateMarketingBlog.org for future tips and tricks!

Tagged as: advertising, internet marketing real estate, internet-marketing-tips, Link Building, online marketing, online marketing real estate, real estate real-estate-marketing, real estate internet marketing, real-estate-marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search engine optimization training

  • http://www.homesaledirectory.com Home for Sale

    Any tips on link building strategies is always welcome and helpful. Link building is not an easy task. I have also started joining a lot of helpful forums and creating links and relationships that ways as well.

  • Susan

    Interesting article. I’ve been trying to seo my site and I’ve downloaded that program that turns all nofollow links to bright pink. What I’ve discovered is that most sites are “nofollow” and it’s difficult to get links in any decent site without paying.

    Did you know that Youtube, Yahoo’s Delicious and many, many sites are all nofollow? I have a dark sense of humor, so I actually find it kind of funny. Over the past couple years, I carefully selected 600 sites to link to that were great and only in recent months have discovered that only 30 of my links were follow links. No juice for Susan. They should change the name to “nobodyfollows”. lol. The funny thing is, I bet 98% of people doing seo on their own have no idea they are making the same error that I did. Just a bunch of starving real estate agents chasing their own tails.

    One question I don’t have answered is about paying for links. Some people say it’s bad to pay for high ranking links and that Google will penalize those who do it, but many of my competitors are doing just that and they are pr1-4 and I am a pr0. However, many of them pay hundreds of sites. I don’t know how they remember who they have to pay at the end of the month. So what if I just did the ones you suggest? Do you think it’s worth paying $300 dollars per year each to get links in Yahoo and Best of the Web? It would only be two links for $600. What is your take on the cost vs. reward? How much can one very high pr ranking site affect my own site? If you answer this question, please send me the link to the answer in my email to be sure I won’t miss it. Sorry, I am a long winded little critter.

    Susan

  • http://www.realestatemarketingblog.org Vinny LaBarbera

    Thanks for reading our blog Susan.

    You bring up some great, and common, questions. Here’s our take:

    Question: Should you buy links?

    Answer: This is definitely a loaded question, especially since Google clearly states that website owners should NOT buy or sell links. That being said, if a link from an authoritative website is going to send your website lots of relevant, quality traffic each month, then in our opinion it makes sense to consider paying for those links. Put it this way, we would rather pay for a link that is going to consistently send good traffic to our website, then a link that just has a high PageRank that may or may not make a difference in our natural rankings.

    As with anything in online marketing and SEO, things just need to be done in moderation and be done for the right reasons. If you are buying links to try and game the system in a short period of time, then your intentions are not aligned with Google’s guidelines. The best kind of links should be attained naturally, over time.

    We would recommend investing time and money into developing great content. If your website does not have quality content, then thinking about link building should not even be an option.

    Question: Are Paid Directories worth the investment?

    Answer: We are huge fans of the top paid directories like BOTW, JoeAnt and Business.com. Inclusion into these directories has almost become a necessary step in an online marketing plan as these directories still get tons of exposure and can often pass valuable link juice to a website. If you have the budget to pay for inclusion in these, then go for it. If you have a limited budget and have to decide between paying for inclusion in these directories and paying for something else, then we would recommend that you invest in great content instead (as stated above). Quality content will go much further and will be much more long lasting.

    One thing to keep in mind with most paid directories as well is that as these directory pages that link out to multiple websites continue to grow, and continue to include more links, each link will become less valuable as the amount of “link juice” will become diluted. If a web page has a PR 5 and only has 5 links on it to other websites, then the link juice to these 5 sites will be much stronger then if this PR 5 web page had 50 links to other websites as the link juice will be spread across all 50 links.

    Question: How much can one very high PR web page actually impact someone’s natural rankings?

    Answer: Going back to what we described above, if a web page with a high PR has only a few links to other websites on it, then the link juice from that high PR web page can be very powerful. However, if that high PR web page has tons of links to other websites, then the link juice to your website will be far less powerful.

    Some Quick Link Building Tips for the more savvy marketer:
    1) First and foremost, develop great content and update your website(s) with it frequently
    2) Get links from web pages that do not have “nofollow” tags on them
    3) Get links from web pages that do not have more than 10-20 links to other websites on them already
    4) Make sure that any link you attain is using anchor text and does not just say something like “Click Here”
    5) Try to get your link placed within the body / content of a web page
    6) Try to get your link placed as high on the web page as possible

    Still have questions or need more tips, advice or help with Link Building? Or, would you prefer to just focus on real estate and let a professional take care of your SEO and link building? Just let us know how we can help. Although we do not offer our services we can most definitely recommend a reputable, results driven SEO / link building professional / company to those who are interested.

  • Susan

    Awesome. I will keep all of that in mind when doing my future SEO. I’ll keep track of where they plan on putting my links and how many other sites they link to as well. If you could mail me some information on a reputable white hat seo pro, I will contact them before the end of the year. Your help is much appreciated.

  • http://www.realestatemarketingblog.org Vinny LaBarbera

    Sure thing.

    Good luck with your marketing Susan.

    Cheers!

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