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!

One of the most straightforward methods of discovering new link building ideas is by solving customer problems. Below are five straightforward techniques to uncover customer problems you could turn into a great link building strategy.

Effective Keyword Research

First step is to use your favorite keyword research tool to find out what your customers are searching for. Try to drill down the massive keyword list and look for phrases that indicate that the person is looking for answers to a problem. These could include such words as “how to,” “help,” “tutorial,” “walk through”, “fix,”, “problem” etc. So basically now that you know specific problems that customers need to have solved you can easily use this information to create a great link building strategy — and gain new customers & leads at the same time.

Talk with your Customers

You can also identify some cool link building ideas by simply talking to your customer and solving some of their biggest problems and challenges. This includes conducting a customer satisfaction survey, making random phone calls to your customers, or even letting customers’ fill-in a simple feedback form in your brick-and-mortar locations. Think of conducting a survey of clients to find out their challenges for the upcoming year. Make sure that you have lots of open-ended questions so that their ideas include a lot of less obvious opportunities.

Use Forums, Blogs and Social Media Effectively

Try to allocate at least an hour a day to spend time going through the top forums, blogs, and social media sites in your industry to discover recurring problems people face and the most common questions that they have. For blogs and social media, pay close attention to the quick comments people leave. If you feel that enough people are desperate enough to know about something that you specialize in, just blog about it and put the link in the comment too.

Talk with your own Staff

If you are a business, speaking to your account managers, customer service staff, and salespeople can really help you to understand some of the issues that your customers are having in general. Writing on those topics in your company blog can definitely attract a lot of eyeballs and eventually help you to get more links. Try to keep customer service representatives keep track of problems or questions customers have throughout the week.

Browse the Consumer Review Sites

Research the popular consumer review sites for your industry. Try to spot recurring problems. Review sites usually provide a lot of valuable customer data. Use the information gathered about what customers are searching for and brainstorm link building ideas with your company staffs. Include people from different departments since you never know who’ll come up with that incredible idea!
Always try to be different: put a spin on the normal idea. It’s easy to copy what another company has already done, but it’s a lot harder to be the unique one. If you want a lot of links to your site, you must do and be something that others simply are not. You need to give something worthwhile to the community and they will always link to you as a “thank you”.

Good link building is almost like good marketing. It’s about solving problems, being creative, doing research and just thinking outside the box.

Not all link spikes set off the flags. If the link spikes to your website are associated with something that is happening around on the web or if it is based on a special event, then such link spikes may not be looked at with suspicion. For example, if you have a link worthy article or news that are time bound talking of a particular trend in the real estate market, it might attract the other website owners to link to you and such links may disappear when the news or the article is no more link worthy. Such link spikes are explainable.

Search engines look at paid links with contempt and hence link spikes that are not explainable are also looked at with contempt because number of website owners try to increase their links count by getting paid links. Web masters try to increase the links count to boost their ranking for certain keywords that are most widely searched for; link spikes that are associated with such trends may elicit penalty if you have not used legitimate or natural link building methods.

Here are some examples where we can expect natural links spikes:

Press Releases – Press releases are bound to cause link spikes. For example, when you expand your real estate services to a new area you might go for press release distribution to spread the word across and this will result in natural links spike when the press release is distributed across the web.

Social Bookmarking and Social Media – Social media can bring about link spikes based on trendy topics. Your social bookmarks may be followed by many if they are impressive enough.

News Breaks – If your website is related to something that features in the news then you can expect a natural links spike.

These are just few situations where we can expect natural link spikes and these are not necessarily mutually exclusive situations. At times, a combination of these situations can bring about link spikes.
We should also know the types of link spikes that create trouble. If you happen to get sudden rise in the number of links to your website or blog without anything happening that relate to the increase in links count, then you should know that you can be in trouble. So do not implement any real estate link building strategies that will create such an effect on your results. Try to go for phased link building approach for your real estate websites.

We need to pay special attention to link baiting efforts. If you post link worthy content and promote it well, you will end up with link spikes that can affect your website. Careful execution of link baiting strategies is very crucial.

Interestingly, if you can manage to set a regular pattern in link spikes then search engines will not look at your link spikes with suspicion. For example, if you happen to distribute press release articles at the end of every month on the hot properties that you have sold and the new properties that are listed, then it will become an expected trend rather than a spike. Therefore, careful planning is crucial for all your real estate link building efforts to that your own efforts will not work against you.

1. Page Rank Link: – Also referred to as PR links these links are often used as parameters to check the efficiency of links. They are generally used to increase the PR ranking of web pages. However, there are few professionals who believe it to be an outdated concept to increase the rankings and traffic to a site. All said and done, links from ever popular PR sites continue to help generate good traffic to websites that rely on them. This is largely due to the fact that these sites generally contain top quality content and some domain age. If you are running a new online business then these PR links can be a good choice to get higher search engine rankings and classified traffic. Using thematically relevant sites these links can be formed. As such these links are either bought or swapped with other links. Though these tactics doesn’t sound great legally, they can be pretty useful to your website in one way or other.

2. Trust Rank Link: – These links are made use of under the assumption that a trusted site will pass trust scores to the sites that are linked with it. These links are hardly recognized by Google to define sites in their database. In any case, these trust scores tend to vary from one site to another. Among different factors that can affect a website’s trust rank are website content, domain ages, and page optimization and so on. Backlinks from those sites that are already well established also fall into this category. Links from these sites are highly appreciated by search engines like Google and helps your website rank higher in them. Once the website gets the recognition of being an authoritative site in its sphere of expertise, it gets instant recognition in Google’s search engine. Their authoritativeness is gauged based on the features and quality content displayed in them. Hence a link coming from such a site is always welcome.

One of best ways to get quality links is to make use of authority blog sites. You can make use of these blog sites either to post new blogs or to pass comments on existing blogs. However, be extra careful not to post any irrelevant or vulgar blogs or comments here as these sites get very high traffic. Posting wrong things can easily harm your cause and will do no good to your site’s reputation.

3. Keyword focused link: – Blogs are generally a good reservoir for information of all kinds. Referring contextual links are those that are placed within the body of a blog or an article. People who read these blogs or articles would be undoubtedly interested in either gathering extra information or reading useful content present in them. As such there is every possibility of them clicking on those links that would redirect them to your website. This in turn would be good to your site in getting higher rankings in search engines. It is lot easier to get text links from articles and blogs and than other types of links. One way of achieving it would be to write useful content and get them published in blog submission sites or article directories with links placed in them. No matter what type of website you have, you need backlinks to support it. Different types of links support it differently.

Last but not the least; you need to understand that collecting vital information rather than buying services would be of interest to people who would love to know more about link building techniques. In this context, text links can be pretty useful.

It would be great if individuals in the world would be considerate and posting your link to their website without even asking you. Does this seem like a dream to you? If you take the time to submit a press release, then your dream may just come true. Yes, submitting a press release could very well cause individuals to post your link to their website without even asking you.

When you use a press release, you will be looking to build you links, but what many do not realize is this can actually make their search engine rankings go up. You will be able to put links in your press release that go to your site and this is one of the major factors that individuals over look. When we used the press release method in order to promote our site, we actually got high rankings in Google and got more traffic to our site than we have ever gotten before.

When making a press release, you can put links that go to your home page and you will also be able to do the process of deep linking and link to your other pages, not just your homepage. While deep linking may be hard to do, it is well worth it