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.