One of the most important things you can do to help your real estate website dominate the organic results in the search engines is to build relevant backlinks to it from other websites. Establishing a strong link portfolio can mean the difference between being on the 4th page of Google for your most important key phrase or being in the top 3 positions on the 1st page of Google.
Did You Know? The top 3 organic results on Google account for over 60% of the click throughs on that 1st page.
There are many creative ways to build links, from web directories to press releases, but did you know that you could actually build links from Twitter as well? Social media marketing, through social networks like Twitter, can really help webmasters to get their website the attention it needs to attract valuable links from other websites.
With the help of our featured guest blogger, Kevin Kaiser of Military Homes Realty, we are going to tell you how to leverage Twitter to gain more backlinks to your real estate website.
Tweet for Real Estate Links
Building links to your real estate website is not an easy, quick or fun task for most people – especially if you’re busy helping clients buy, sell and invest in real estate all week. On top of that, if you don’t have a dedicated SEO / link building specialist to help you out, then it is very possible that your efforts are not being maximized to their full potential.
Building backlinks is all about getting the word out to your related community about your content (blog posts, photos, videos, etc). This, in turn, creates buzz and gets people talking about your content all over the Internet. Now, if you don’t have 50k Twitter followers or 20k Facebook fans [arbitrary numbers], then it is even more difficult to broadcast your content to as many people as possible, let alone highly qualified prospects.
Fortunately for real estate agents and brokers who do not have large followings on the major social networks, there are plenty of people who do. These ‘power users’ can be leveraged to help you get the traction, exposure and attention your content needs to attract links.
How to Leverage Twitter Power Users for Link Building
There are many ‘power users’ on the top social networks, especially Twitter, who can be leveraged to help you accomplish your link building goals. Through the use of a service called Sponsored Tweets, advertisers can take advantage of the reach that many power publishers have to get the attention they need.
How Sponsored Tweets Work
It’s quite simple actually. You (the advertiser) pay a certain amount of money to a ‘power user’ (the publisher) to tweet whatever content you wish. This tweet, featuring your content and linking back to your website / blog, will be seen by ALL of the people following said ‘power user’ (the publisher).
By choosing targeted publishers that have a strong following of people possibly interested in your content, you can and will effectively build increased traffic to your website / blog. Increased traffic from these targeted tweets will improve the likelihood of someone seeing your content, finding it useful or resourceful and thus, wanting to link to it from their website / blog. It is very possible that just one (1) sponsored tweet from the right publisher can bring your content more traffic than it has ever received as well as multiple backlinks from other relevant websites.
More traffic = More Links = Better Rankings = Even More Traffic = More Leads
Creative Ways to Use Sponsored Tweets
Don’t just rely on your content alone to attract links. More often than not, you need to get creative with how you promote your content, no matter how good it is. There is way too much information on the Internet already so the better job you can do of making your content seem more important, the more likely it will be that your content will get linked to.
One creative idea is to hold contests for visitors that get to your website through your sponsored tweets. You may need to drop a little extra money here for prizes to sweeten the deal for your visitors, but an attractive offer can often return a much higher ROI than other link building options. Think outside the box on this stuff…what would your visitors want a chance to win? What would entice them to want to link to my website, or even better, become a lead?
Other Sponsored Tweet Options
There are numerous options available for leveraging Twitter and its power users to help you build links and actual leads from someone else’s following. We mentioned Sponsored Tweets above, but here are a few others to check out if you’re interested:
As with any link building strategy, make sure to diversify – don’t use or rely on one strategy to get all of your backlinks. Be creative and try different things. Many will fail, but the experience you will pick up from trying will prove invaluable as you become more savvy at building valuable links back to your website.
At the end of the day though, remember one thing…building links, optimizing your website, getting ranked organically….these are all means to an end, they are not goals. Your main goal should always be to generate as many qualified real estate leads from your web properties as possible. Too many real estate agents get distracted with these ‘means’ and forget that everything they do needs to focus on generating good leads. Without this return, everything else is useless.
We wish you the best with your link building endeavors. We would also like to thank Kevin Kaiser, the Online Marketing Director for Military Homes, for contributing some useful content for this post. If you, or someone you know, is looking for a military home or looking to sell their military home, then be sure to check out MilitaryHomes.com.