A well-built back link portfolio must have links that are generated from guest blogging. Simply put, guest blogging can be your ticket to that rounded-out website back link portfolio. If you want to get into guest blogging, but you’re not sure where to start, how to do it, and where to find the best blogs on which to deliver your content, read on.

• Find your avenues – First things first: you must find relevant blogs on which to post your blogs. Ideally, these blogs should be directly related to your real estate business because search engines will look favorably upon your guest blogs. In other words, if you blog on sites that don’t have much (or anything) to do with real estate, the search engines will not find these to be very credible.

Don’t think, however, that the blogs on which you contribute must be directly linked to real estate. They can be indirectly linked to real estate and still be considered credible by the search engines. Plus, you may be able to reach customers you may not have otherwise reached. For example, consider blogging on a site for green building materials or home improvement ideas. Although these sites don’t sell real estate, they ultimately deal with homes, home building and perhaps home buying and selling. Get creative and consider all your options!

• Consider your options – Your guest blogging campaign should be started by searching a keyword or topic in Google plus the word “blog.” You would be surprised how many blogs you can stumble across by simply performing a simply keyword search. You can also perform more advanced search queries if you’d like, but I guarantee you there will be a multitude of relevant blogs pulled up by simply entering a few, key terms, words and/or phrases.

• Reach out to other bloggers – Once you have a comprehensive list of blogs, now is the time to test your outreach capabilities. Your best course of action is to build a relationship with the blogger or website owner by commenting or reaching out through social channels. You may also want to email them and express how much you enjoy their blog and appreciate the information they provide. Also let them know you have been sharing their information across a number of social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Simply by establishing a relationship with a fellow blogger you can increase your chances of success when it comes time to ask them if they’d like you to guest blog.

• Establish an ongoing relationship – Don’t just post one blog and consider your guest blogging job done. Consider developing ongoing relationships with other bloggers and share your content (and theirs) through a variety of social channels. Develop quality guest blogging partners, so to speak, so you can both benefit from the power of guest blogging.

If you want to continue building your real estate business through link building and you simply don’t have the time to browse the Internet (who does?), it pays to consider taking advantage of some of the free alert tools available.

Free alerts allow you to monitor any number of things, such as your brand, a particular keyword, or simply to stay informed of the latest happenings in your local real estate market. In particular, you can use alerts to keep you informed of new places to get a link.

Here is a list of just some of the information you can obtain through web and social media alerts:

• When your brand or business is mentioned
• When your competitors are mentioned
• When there is news in your industry
• When your competitors supply guests posts on other websites
• When a website is looking for guests posts about the local real estate market
• When someone posts a real estate question that you can answer
• New any new real estate websites pop up
• When a blog mentions you or your brand
• When potential customers begin asking questions

In other words, web and social media site alerts not only keep you in the loop regarding your business, but they also serve as a great tool for following your competitors’ business. And, of course, any time you can answer a question or snag a new customer is a bonus.

Google alerts is super-easy to use, as you can set up basic alerts for your business or industry, or you can also customize your alerts to inform you on a daily or weekly basis of new information. Finally, you can choose the source of your information, such as blogs, news, video, discussions, etc.

If you want a great source for social media alerts, try Social Mention. It works like Google alerts, only for the social media sites. This system provides you with a daily alert about what is being discussed on social media sites. And don’t forget to use both Twitter and Facebook alerts as your primary source of information regarding these social media sites.

Just because a link opportunity isn’t picture perfect doesn’t mean that it’s not worthy of your attention. In other words, instead of searching high and low for that perfect link, there are ways you can evaluate the value of a link and save yourself a considerable amount of time and effort.

There are several things you should consider when deciding whether or not you’ve got yourself a good link:

• One of the first things to consider about a link is the authority of the domain.  In other words, the more authority the domain has the more likely the major search engines will pay attention when it comes to the metrics of their outbound links. In general, it is best to find a domain authority of at least 30 – anything less than that will not likely yield positive results for your link efforts.
• Pay attention to the anchor text, as it is likely the most important factor of a link.  In other words, attempt to get links with your keywords that appear in the anchor text. Get creative, though, as identical anchor text will likely be picked up on by the major search engines.
• Consider writing press releases to achieve a variety of trustworthy links. Many media outlets have built up a considerable amount of trust with major search engines, which help with your overall linking efforts.
• Remain relevant when it comes to your content. Your best bet is to get quality links from other real estate websites. In other words, your real estate links won’t mean much if the content relates to something completely different.
• Determine where your links are being placed. The truth is that a link in the content near the top of a page is much more likely to be clicked on than a link that appears in the footer of the page. You can have all the links in the world, but if they aren’t being clicked they aren’t doing you much good.

In other words, don’t underestimate the power of links in your real estate blog articles. In fact, use them to your advantage by showing your readers other pertinent material that may be quite useful to them.

Providing More Information

There is so much information to be gained by using links. Consider that, when used properly, links help our readers relate to the real estate information that we are relaying. They are saying: look at this if you want more information or if you need clarification! They are the quickest way to send your readers to your real estate website or other websites that may provide them with useful information about the article’s topic.

Provide your Readers with Pertinent Links

In other words, they are your opportunity to show your readers your work. Your real estate know-how can really begin paying off if you provide your readers with pertinent links to other related articles or information on you, your real estate business or the real estate business in general.

Links provide this information without sending the reader one a wild goose chase. No longer do we have to scan for footnotes and sources; instead, all of the information needed for the reader exists right there, in your carefully placed links.

Links in your real estate blog articles will also provide your readers with the opportunity to check your work or look at another point of view. In short, they can lend credibility to your real estate articles by showing your point of view – as well as other’s – in a fair and balanced manner.

In short, links keep us honest, they lend credibility to our work and they provide the reader with a chance to read further about any real estate-driven issue. Best of all, they give our readers a chance to understand our work and our business.

Google terms the outside linking process and analysis “PageRank.” The PageRank link analysis tells Google how many times a link is provided to a specific website, and the importance of the other websites providing the links. Thus, with PageRank an important element in overall search ranking, it is good to distribute articles through article distribution sites and do guest blogging on other websites, right? Not necessarily, says Google.

Webmaster trend analyst, John Mueller posts many articles and interviews about web ranking. In a recent interview with UK web architect, Rhys Wynne, Mueller states, “it generally makes much more sense to create great content for your own site, instead of giving it to a large number of other sites to publish.” He goes on to say about guest blogging:

“making and promoting a new site takes time and effort. In general I would recommend putting that work into your own site, instead of creating content for other people’s sites. It’s much better to create great content for your blog and to let other sites refer visitors to your site on their own.”

So does this mean you should not guest blog for other sites, or submit your own blog articles for publication through distribution sites? Not at all. What Mr. Mueller is saying is that outside links to your site should occur naturally, and through the efforts of other people who like your website and its content. In essence, that is what a Google “perfect world” would look like.

However, don’t let Google’s answer intimidate you from guest blogging and practicing article distribution to help your outside links. These are indeed important steps. In fact, they may be critical. It is very possible that the remarks made were specific, as Google  regularly  dissuades people from utilizing tactics that may enhance their rankings or manipulate search engine rankings. As Mr. Mueller says, it is important to invest the time in your own real estate blog and make sure you have quality content worth linking back to. However, this coupled with guest blogging, and article directory submissions could indeed be a powerful combination that allows one to compete for even the most competitive of terms.

By performing guest blogging and article directory submissions one would be taking a proactive approach to enhancing their online presence.

The first factor revolves round the reinforcement value. By linking to your website how would the linking website benefit? After all everyone wants to know “what’s in it for me?” By linking to your website, your link partner should benefit in any one of the following ways.

Recognition – By linking to your website, will your linking partner get any special recognition? Is your website part of the top 10 or top 100 lists in your niche? Such websites will get their links much faster.

Resource – Does your website provide useful information? Will it be a useful resource to the linking partner and to the visitors of the linking partner’s website? You will have a good reason to link to a website that offers exclusive information that is related to the concerned niche.

Association – What is the association value in linking to you? Are you a member of any of the online consortiums, any directory of businesses, etc? This will make more sense to link to your link partners to have an affiliation with your website.

Reciprocation – Will your linking partner get a link back to their website and if yes, will your link be of any value to them? How relevant is your website to the linking partner and his or her niche? It makes more sense if two real estate portals to link to each other. This will facilitate easy sharing of knowledge and information on the real estate industry belonging to a particular region.

Besides the above factors on the benefits your linking partner will get by linking to you, there are other influencing factors such as Action, Interest, Desire, Attention, etc.

Your link request emails should be very carefully drafted so that you will be able to get the desired results out of your efforts.

Grabbing the attention – You must remember that the webmaster that you are contacting will be getting a number of similar mails like the one you are sending to request your mail. Unless you get their attention, it is not going to work because they will not have the time to review all the link request mails that they get. Here are few tips that will help you grab the attention of your prospective linking partner.

• Make sure to use the name of the person you are contacting and not just their designation.
• Make your mails sound interesting and not the regular template based email that you copied from one of the link requests that you received.
• Let your subject line, starting paragraphs and closing lines be striking enough to get their attention.

Creating Interest
It is not enough to get the attention but it is even more crucial to get their interest to read through the entire mail. Every one likes to know how they can benefit from your mail so put that first. Make them feel important and special in your link request. Do not try to write elaborately about your services and features of your services.

Creating the Desire to Link
Your request mail should create the desire to link to your website. To do that you should now what they want and giving them exactly that. It can be an eBook, newsletter or even an RSS feed that they want others to subscribe to and before contacting them subscribe to those. This will influence them to return the favor.

Provide them with genuine contact details, email address and your businesses physical address. Be available if they need to contact you.

Tell them the benefits of linking to your website especially how beneficial it will be for their website visitors.

Make Them Take Action
The idea of your link request mail is not to send a thought provoking message that will make them think but they need to act right away. So provide them with the code to link to your website and ask them to send their code to reciprocate their link.

The next time you draft a link request, incorporate all the above factors and you will certainly see better conversion rates.

Therefore, before you start your link building campaign for your real estate website, you should know what matters and what does not matter when it comes to links. Without knowing this, all your efforts may turnout to be futile. Here are few factors that matter while building your links.

There are two basic requirements for a link to pass on its link value to your website:

The first important factor is that your link should be embedded using hard coded HTML. Though there are reports that say that Google is also takes into consideration links presented using JavaScript, it is best to stick to HTML. For example the link should be embedded in using the following tag: < a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com” >

The second factor is that the page from which you are getting your link should already be indexed by Google. You will be able to find out whether a page is already present in Google’s index using the site operator in Google. Until a page is indexed, you cannot expect any good to come out of the link embedded in that page.

Factors That Affect Your Link Count

The following factors will block the search engines from taking the link into account.

1.Nofollow Attribute: Today many websites use this attribute to curb the menace of online spamming. Google disregards links that come with ‘Nofollow’ attribute. You must therefore whether a website uses nofollow attribute for its link before you spend your precious time in submitting your link.
2.Redirects – If the link value has to be passed on to the link, then the pages should use 301 permanent redirects in case there should be any need for redirects. If you are using 302 or temporary redirects, you cannot get any benefit for links that go through your temporary page.
3.Robots nofollow – If nofollow attribute is used in the Robot.txt file then all the links in such pages will not get any link juice.
4.Links presented through JavaScript – There are differences in opinions with regard to the status of the links presented through JavaScript. Some say that Google does not take into account JavaScript links while others deny it. It is best to avoid JavaScript links to be on the safer side.

Further Symptoms That Affect the Link Value
Low PR Sites – Google is very careful not to promote websites that try to manipulate the search engines. For example, it can penalize a website that sells links by reducing its PageRank even though the site may have all the other qualifying factors for good PR. Google may stop following links from such problematic sites.
Old Cache Date – This can be an indicator that Google does not consider a website important and that is the reason why its bots do not frequent them. As a result, they have old cache rates. If the page from which your are getting your link has a cache date that is longer than a month, then you should try to avoid such websites because this could also be a symptom of bad neighborhood.
Location of the link – This is yet another factor that affects the quality of the links. Links in sidebars are often devalued as they are associated with advertisements and paid links. It is best to get your links from within the content of the page.

Checking a Link for Its SEO Value

You will be able to check the link value by creating a link on the page with a unique modifier that is rather obscure. If your web page is ranked for that obscure keyword after few days, then it will indicate that the link juice is being passed on from the linking page.

One of the best ways of having your link bait distributed is through social media network. You must post your attractive content in as many social media networks and directories as possible. The idea here is to create a buzz about your content and to prompt people to share with others your unique content. This process is also known as seeding. You must try to reach to social news sites that are voted upon by the users. If your content gets a large number of votes, then it will elicit the interest of others too. You will be able to see your content in the first page of the news site when it becomes one of the most voted news item. It has been proved that news items in the front pages of the news sites get the most clicks. Your link bait will be viewed by hundreds of visitors and a certain percentage of visitors will click your website link and visit your website. Some of the popular sites where you can submit your news include but not limited to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.

Yet another social media site that is becoming increasingly popular is Twitter. However, you can expect others to link to you only when you have some worthwhile stuff that others can link.

Link Bait Strategies

When you are using link baits, your intention is not only to make people link to you but also to make those who see your bait to click on the bait and visit your website or to vote for your news item, which will increase the popularity of the item you submit. It is not the social media sites that offer you the best links, they often come with nofollow attribute. The best links come from other internet users such as bloggers, news publishers and journalists. If the news item or the content you have submitted is of good quality, they will write about it and link to the source article.

Some of the best baits include the following:

Breaking News – this is one of the top baits. If you publish hot news, then you can ensure a vast traffic to your website. You can elicit a great interest in the social media sites as well as from the news communities. Though breaking news will attract a lot of traffic, they are not the best ones for getting back links.

Controversial Posts

By making controversial posts or by playing devils advocate you can attract a lot of attention to your posts. However, you must be very careful in creating such content to ensure that you do not get into hot waters through your posts and become unpopular through your posts.

Resourceful Posts

Resourceful posts not only get a great level of attention, they also bring in a large number of links to your website. You must make sure to create resources that are not time bound so that they will continue to bring more links to your website.

Humorous Posts

Funny posts have always been the favorite of many online users. Humorous posts have long life when compared to news items.

Ego Posts

You will be able to make popular community members to promote your content by making a mention of their names in your content in such a way to inflate their ego. You will certainly get links from the people whose egos you are boosting.

The most important aspect of link baiting is to create content that users can identify with, something that they can connect to; such content is sure to bring a great level of success in getting you the desired links for your website.

Step 1

One of the things you can do to build back links for your real estate website is to explore the possibilities of getting back links from your competitors. How do you do this? You will certainly know the top keywords for your website. Just to give you an example, “Realtors Florida” can be one of your top keywords. You should first make a search in Google using these keywords and see what comes up. Choose the top 20 websites and these are your competitors as long as your online competition is concerned. You must visit these websites and check whether there are any possibilities of getting back links from their website. May be they have a forum where you can post your questions or they have a blog in which you can leave your comments. You can even think of product reviews. You must make a list of all such possibilities in a systematic way.

Step 2

The next step will be to make a search in Yahoo using the URL of the competitors, which you gathered in the previous step using the Linkdomain parameter. This will get you a nice list of websites that link to your competitor. This time as you would have guessed already, you must visit these sites as well, to look for possible linking options and list all the possibilities here again. When you are making the list, it will be helpful to note the following information:

1)Status of ‘nofollow’ attribute. If the page/website uses no follow attribute, then it will not be helpful in improving your PR but it can send you targeted traffic to your website. So do not ignore it either way.
2)PageRank of the website. Higher the PR the better.
3)Possibility of using anchor text to get the back link. Here again, don’t ignore the website either way because your ranking will be helped either way though linking through anchor text will be the best thing to do.

You must repeat step 2 for all the websites in your list, which you obtained in step 1. We know what you are thinking. Visiting all the sites will look like a mountainous task especially when you are going to lock on to competitors that have hundreds if not thousands of back links. However, you should only consider each site as your opportunity to build link to your website.

Step 3

Here you have to start hunting for some decent directories to which you can submit your website. Google is the best place to start here again. Make use of ‘allinurl’ parameter to look for directories.
For example: allinurl:directory “Florida”

Google will line up all the top directories that contain categories related to Florida. You can start with the first 20 directories and try to see the opportunities here for submitting your website in some way or the other. Here you will find free directories as well as paid directories. List all the directories that allow you to submit to your website without any fee.

Step 4

The next step is to venture into related industries. If you feel that the list that you have generated in the last three steps is not big enough, then you can start exploring the opportunities for building links using websites within related niches. Here you will have to use little broader terms. When you make use of broader keyword search that will connect you to websites in the related niches, you can go through the entire process of identifying the opportunities for your links by visiting as many sites as you would like to visit.

Tools needed for your link building efforts

You will need Google Toolbar to help see the PageRank of the web pages you are visiting. You can also try one of the plug-ins that will help you check the PR if you are using FireFox. You need a tool to help you find whether a page uses nofollow attribute or not. You can try a tool like Greasemonkey. Just make sure to enable the nofollow highlighter option if you are using Greasemonkey.

1. Relevancy is the Key: Search engines always value links which are relevant. If you are an real estate agent and you are submitting your website in a gardening directory just to get that one extra back link, then you are not doing yourself any good. Very likely that either the directory owner won’t accept your real estate website on a gardening directory, or even if it somehow slips the eye of the moderator – Google won’t be valuing that link as much as it would have if it were a real estate directory. So don’t try to send your website to every directory on the planet. Do your own research and figure out which directories are more relevant to your website and to your business. If you are submitting your site in a general directory make sure that you choose the right category for your website.
2. Write a neat description: Many website owners directory submission is wasted because they don’t often think that website’s description is important! Many of them often just fill in the name and the URL and leave the description box empty. Having a nice description which is unique and helps to describe your website really increases your chance of being accepted into the directory. The directory moderators gets thousands of links everyday to moderate, and in most cases when they see a website with a nice ‘non-spammy’ description, they just accept it without even actually checking out the website. For some more renowned directories this may not be the case, however, you will definitely have a better chance of catching the attention of the moderator, if you have a neat description without any unnecessary keyword stuffing and spamming.
3. Include a Call to Action – Directories shouldn’t be all about links! Humans do visit directories and often in very difficult situations. For example a desperate home owner might visit several real estate directories to find an agent who can really “do” the job rather than giving false hopes. So when you get that 250 chars for writing your description, make sure that you include your unique selling proposition (USP) to attract visitors back to your website. Since most of the sites in your category are likely to have a very generic description, yours will definitely stand out from others.
4. Mix it up – Don’t trust those automated submission software/service that lets you submit your website to 1000 directories in 2 hours. Directory submission should not be about quantity but quality. You really need to mix things up in your submission and that’s how you would get the most benefit. For example instead of using the same Name/Title (e.g. Dallas Real Estate), you can be creative and use different titles on each time you submit to a directory. By varying the Name/Title, you are actually varying your anchor text which means that you are less likely to be caught by the search engines as a “link spammer”. If search engines finds out that the same anchor text has been used to get 1000 of links within a short period of time then it will raise some serious suspicion.
5. Consider going for Paid Subscription: Many of the free directories are poorly maintained which explains why so many spam sites can easily get on them without being noticed. This is one of the reasons search engines are now giving less value to the directory links. However there are many paid directories out there which are well maintained and are highly moderated. Thus they only let good quality website to be a part of their directory which makes you part of a good link neighborhood. Some good paid directories are – Yahoo Directory, Business.com, BOTW etc.

So the next time you go for directory link hunting, don’t forget to use one of these tips to get the most value out of your submission. Good Luck!