Are you looking for more relevant traffic to your Real Estate web site? Here is a great way to partner your web site to other reputable web sites; it’s called Link Building. Link Building is the practice of getting relevant and reputable web sites to link to your web site. Links can come from a real estate blog, an online advertisement, an online real estate directory listing, real estate related web articles, any page of a web site, an authoritative site and more. The following Pyramid breaks down the different levels of link sources from easiest and lowest cost, to most difficult and highest cost.
The 1st level includes general directories, third-party organizations and classified advertising. To create these partnerships it takes some investment, but it’s not too extensive. Click on the links below to review useful link sources.
Yahoo! Directory – the original web directory
DMOZ – free directory
BOTW – a general directory with decent exposure
Business.com – a business focused directory
Moving up the pyramid is moving you towards more valuable link sources. The 2nd level consists of Blog comments, forums; social media network profile pages, and email lists which require more attention.
Real Estate Tomato – a real estate blog
RealEstateForum.com – a real estate forum
The 3rd level contains article sites, niche directories, man-powered search engines and guest blog postings.
Ibsteam.net – a real estate focused directory
The 4th level is reserved for social media marketing and online public relations.
LinkedIn.com – most popular business focused social media site
MySpace.com – popular general social media site for all ages
Facebook.com – another popular general social media site for all ages
Once you reach the 5th level you get in to advanced link partnerships by reaching key influencers and advanced social media networks.
Finally Level 6 is the crème de la crème of the link sources making them the most valuable of all link partnerships and the most difficult to obtain. These include but are not limited to government sites, military sites, libraries, universities, non-profits, high-traffic Wikipedia pages and so on. Although a large portion of these links are unobtainable, they are undoubtedly worth the time and energy it will take to obtain even one link of this stature.
Link Building can be tedious at times but remember it’s one of the most effective Search Engine Optimization techniques in the business. Having a high volume of relevant, authoritative web sites linking back to your site will continue to be a measure of value in the eyes of both viewers as well as search engines.
Even though one of the biggest drawbacks with building link popularity is time, when done correctly, your linkage will, increase your traffic significantly, improve your visibility in the search engines and provide added resource to your web site.
The typical process goes something like this:
- Research which web sites are the most relevant to your product or services
- Contact those web sites you wish to partner with and request the link
- Wait, wait, and wait some more on those link requests
- Manage and Organize the links
- Ensure that the search engines can find or “spider” your link partners
- Continually check if your links are still on your partner’s web sites
Search engines assess the links that point to your site and rate them by the web sites reputation of the site providing the link (i.e.) Quality and the links Relevancy to the search query entered. The Quantity of Links is no longer as important as Quality and Relevance due to improper Link Building actions. People have abused the linking system by inventing new ways to create link partnerships to multiple sites. In years past many real estate agents engaged in massive link trades with other real estate agents. This only worked for a few years until Google regulated it in early 2007 by penalizing many real estate web sites.
Link Building Faux Pas:
- Link to any Joe Schmo on the street.
- Trading irrelevant links with other sites primarily to manipulate the search engines.
- Creating new Web sites strictly for the sake of making new link exchanges or to provide new links back to your main site.
- Using Link Farms or Link Exchanges to buy links just to build your link popularity.
- Posting a comment or link on every blog or forum you can get your hands on.
By doing all or some of the above it will result in your web site gaining undeserving top positions in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) while sites with relevant content that the user is looking for will drop in rank. This creates a bad taste in a viewer’s mouth and will in turn hurt the reputation not only of your site but of the search engines site. This is why Google is so strict when it comes to their link building policy.
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