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Top Mistakes of Real Estate Link Building
By HHI Golf Guy | January 17, 2006
You might have read an online post or said to yourself, “I have more back links than my competitors and I use the right anchor text. So how come my rankings don’t improve?” On-page SEO issues aside, the answer just might be in your link building tactics.
Most real estate webmasters rely on the principles of reciprocal links to obtain links that point to their own site. Most also understand the importance of using proper anchor text, and a few others are now beginning to understand the importance of link relevance and have made an effort to confine their link building efforts to exchanging with other real estate sites. But that’s not enough if you want to improve your search engine rankings.
Blame It On The Messenger - Not The Message
You already know how to get your message across by using the proper anchor text in your links. The problem is that in many cases you are choosing the wrong messenger. Most outbound link pages are designed an implemented so poorly that the outgoing links have little or no value for your web site. Your own site might even have poorly developed outbound links pages.
Most resource pages on real estate web sites have poor category classification - if they have any category classification at all. Why is proper categorization important? Think about the home page of your own real estate web site. More than likely, the primary phrase you are targeting is “you city + real estate” or “your city + your state + real estate”. You know that search engines have to be able to find these words on your page in order to determine what the page is all about.
Now imagine that your home page has a lot of links and content that mention other cities and states. Do you think that the search engines could easily determine the keywords that you are targeting for your site? It’s the same principle with outbound links pages. The more relevant the content on the link page is to the outbound links on the pages, the more relevance is placed upon the outbound links.
Building Better Outbound Link Pages
Take a look at this Florida real estate links page. Here are they key items to note on that page:
- The page is categorized by State and uses an appropriate title tag.
- The page contains additional Florida information other than just links.
- The site has real content on the page - a mini-article on Sarasota real estate
- The mini-article uses a headline tag to introduce the content, signifying to search engines that this is important to the page theme.
- Even though the page contains links to various Florida real estate agents, these links are grouped together and use another appropriate headline whenever there are two or more agents from the same area.
- The agents from miscellaneous cities also have an appropriate header introducing that section of content.
If No One Else Is Doing This, Who Cares?
You should care! As a general rule, the more quality linksthat you can acquire the less total links you will need to build to improve your own search engine rankings. Let’s face it - link building is a tedious task. More often than not you get less than a 50% return on the requests that you make. But what if there was a place where like minded and goal driven real estate webmasters could share content and links, and all of these webmasters built quality outbound links pages?
That is the reasoning behind Real Estate Link HQ.com. It’s a place where you know that you are dealing with trusted real estate web sites. We have a rigorous screening process, and membership is limited. If you truly want to improve your search engine rankings through link building you need check out Real Estate Link HQ.
Topics: Real Estate SEO |
4 Responses to “Top Mistakes of Real Estate Link Building”
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January 20th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Great article. Thanks for the good read and keep up the great job on this new blog!
February 12th, 2006 at 6:39 am
In addition to the quality of the links, consideration should be given to periodically updating a lot of the content. New search engine algorythems give substantially more weight to dynamic content than they have in the past.
Randy
www.4mysales.com
March 3rd, 2006 at 10:11 am
Nice and informative post. Keep it up and Good luck. (”,)
March 10th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Very interesting article. I took a look at the site and it is indeed very well organized and seems like a good model for a links directory. I will bookmark the page, and consider submitting my Florida Apartments page to be included.
Thanks