Real Estate SEO: Linking Your Way to Online Visibility

When you make your real estate website more visible to search engines, you also make it more visible to your target audience. This is the whole point of real estate search engine optimization (SEO) – to help potential clients find you online.

Link building plays a major role in search engine visibility. By "link building," I mean increasing the number of websites that link to yours. Search engines, particularly Google, use link popularity to help evaluate and rank your website. Link popularity refers to the number, quality and relevance of inbound links from other websites to yours.

Okay, so links are important. But how do you go about finding them? How do you convince other websites to link to yours? Follow these seven steps to link-building success, and you'll be well on your way.

1. Start on your own website.
Link building begins on your own website. All too often, I see website owners throw up a new site and go out hunting for links before they have a website worth linking to.

Think about it for a moment. Aside from web directories and other paid listings, who would link to a bare-bones website with nothing unique, helpful or interesting to offer? I know I wouldn't. If you start a link-building campaign before your website has earned its place on the web, you're going to have a long, hard time of it.

On the other hand, if you develop the kind of website that makes others in your industry or community say, "Wow, that's really something! I know some folks who would like that," your link-building efforts will be much easier. It all starts with what you put into your website.

2. Pursue the right kinds of links.
Sure, you want a lot of links to your website. We all do. But you should always put link quality before link quantity. Jim Boykin, SEO expert and owner of WeBuildPages.com, said it best: "It's not always 'He with the most links' who wins the game … Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1,000 of the wrong links."

What makes for a quality link? Generally speaking, the most valuable links (for SEO purposes) are those that come from older, well-established sites within your topic area. For instance, a direct link from a site like Reals.com will offer more SEO benefit than a hundred links from brand new, low-ranking websites.

3. Use your imagination.
Links are everywhere. They are what make the web, well … a web. So link-building opportunities are everywhere, as well. You can gain links by syndicating press releases, publishing articles online, adding your website to directories, growing a blog, participating in forums, plus a number of other tactics. When you combine quality content or a unique website with a strong imagination, your link opportunities are limitless.

4. Alternate your link text.
To gain visibility for more of your key phrases, it's a good ideas to mix up your link text. By "link text," I'm referring to the words that make up the actual hyperlink. For instance, instead of having a thousand incoming links that use the phrase "Anytown real estate," you could rotate between "Anytown real estate" and "Anytown home buying" and "Real estate agents in Anytown" … you get the idea. This will help your website rank well for more phrases, thereby increasing the number of ways people can find you.

5. Track your progress.
Tracking your link-building progress helps you measure your long-term success. It can also be a morale booster to know your efforts are paying off. You want to see some positive results to justify your hard work, don't you? Of course you do. So keep track of your link-building progress the same way you keep track of your overall website traffic and rankings.

There are a number of online tools that can help you identify inbound links from other websites to yours. Yahoo Site Explorer is my personal favorite. You can use Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) to find out which websites link to yours. You can also export this information into a spreadsheet for further use. Nice, huh?

I check my inbound links once per month. That way, I can see my link popularity growing right before my eyes. It's a nice way to validate all the hard work I put into it!

6. Keep the big picture in mind.
Sure, links play a major role in your website's visibility. But there's a lot more to SEO than links. So if you tend to get carried away with individual tasks, like I sometimes do, you might want to create a schedule of SEO tasks. This will prevent you from spending too much time on any one task. Set aside some time for link building, article publishing, website improvement, etc.

More importantly, don't adopt "SEO tunnel vision" to the point you neglect your website's primary offering (whether that be products, services, content, or a combination of the three).

7. Enjoy aging well.
One of my favorite things about search engine optimization is how it gets easier as you go. When you put the right fundamentals in place up front, you'll be able to increase your website's visibility with less effort over time. Most search engines -- and especially Google -- place a lot of emphasis on the age of your web domain, your individual web pages, and the links coming into those web pages. Like a good wine, links get better with age!

* You may republish this article online if you retain the author's byline and the active hyperlinks below. Copyright 2006, Austin SEO Guy.

About the Author:
Brandon Cornett is the author of The Agent's Guide to Search Engine Visibility, a 130-page SEO training kit designed specifically for real estate agents. Learn more about real estate SEO by visiting: http://www.ArmingYourFarming.com/search
Article Submitted On: October 21, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/