Real Estate SEO and Online Marketing Blog by Jerry Mosher

Building links is the core of good SEO.

Real Estate link building is just like link building for any other website. Although there are some things that you might want to veer away from or at least not overdue.

A while back a real estate website provider was trying to help their clients and suggested reciprocal linking. This was a good idea until everyone went overboard. They all started linking to each other and soon had link partner pages with 100’s of reciprocal links. Their rankings went up, and then Google caught it. Penalization.

Reciprocal linking has never been the same since. If you are reciprocal linking make sure you don’t overdue it. If you have a reciprocal link page with 100’s of links you might want to go clean it up a bit. I’ve seen sites jump up in the rankings just by cleaning it up and reducing the amount of links.

Building Links

• When getting links, you want to get them from sites about the same or similar topic as possible.
• Make sure the page your link will be on is indexed. (search the exact url in Google)
• Make sure the links are not redirects. (if you hover over the link and in the bottom left of your browser a different url than your website appears, it’s probably a useless link for SEO purposes)
• Vary your anchor text. It is important not to get all links with the same anchor text.
• Build links to internal pages and NOT just the homepage. (use appropriate anchor text for other pages)
• Don’t get an abnormally large amount of links in to short a period. Try to be consistent. Get 10 links or so a day. More or less is fine just don’t go crazy.

Good Places to Build Links

• Related forums and blogs are good places to get links. Post comments and get involved in discussions. Try to provide helpful comments and don’t just spam. Forums usually allow a signature which is where your link should be. Most blogs will allow you to enter a url when posting, most are nofollow but don’t worry about it.
• Profile Pages are a great place to get links. Activerain is a good place to set up a profile. You can set up a profile at youtube and other places(think outside the box).
• Article directories are an excellent link source. Write some real estate articles and submit them to article directories like ezinearticles
• Create your own content sites like Squidoo. Create a local real estate lens with updated market info.
• Turn your listing photos into a Virtual Tour with Windows Movie Maker or Animoto and upload it to youtube.
• Start Blogging: Get a blog going either on your site or on a free blogging platform and start blogging. You can drop links in your posts.
• Create content on your own website. More pages on your site equals more pages to link with.

There’s plenty more to cover but this should help with your real estate link building efforts. Participating in a real estate related community site or local community site is something you should definitely get involved in. Just remember not to spam your link.

ActiveRain is a really good real estate network to build a profile and blog. I think they are charging to get a blog now but you can just create a profile and leave comments on other blogs if you aren’t comfortable with writing a blog yet.