One can never say that they have learned everything pertaining to search engines and real estate search engine optimization. There is no end to learning in these areas because they both constantly evolve on daily basis. A technique that works for today may not produce the same results after a short period of time. It is not because you are doing something wrong but it is just because search engines have moved further from where they were since the time you implemented those techniques for your real estate website. For instance submitting to online directories may have worked extremely well at one point but today because of the abuse in this area, search engines have learned to devalue links coming from certain directories.
However, this does not mean that it happens to all the SEO techniques. Even today good number of old SEO techniques work well. Amongst such techniques, you can list link request to build links for your real estate website. By making other websites and blogs to link to your website or blog, your ranking will be boosted even today.
One of the drawbacks here is that not many real estate webmasters know how to make proper link requests. Their faulty approach makes their request mails dumped into the spam mail folder. With a little bit of finesse in their approach, you can get links that will speak volumes for your search engine rankings. Here are some tips that will help you get better results.
Building Relationships – Try to avoid requesting for a link in your first email, first phone call or first meeting. Your intention should be to build a relationship with the webmaster from which you intend to get a link. If you have a blog, it will be much easier to establish relationship with other blog owners by leaving good feedbacks and comments in other blogs. You will also be able to interact with the other bloggers through chat and email. This should help you create a network of online friends. Once you have befriended them, they would not mind linking to your blog or website.
Subject line of your link request – If you make mistakes here, your mails are sure to enter the spam mail folder. So avoid subject lines such as “Link to my site”, “Visit my website” etc. This step is all the more crucial if you are contacting someone for the first time. Subject lines like, “About your blog, “name of the blog” will elicit the interest of the recipient.
Personal Greetings – Make sure to use the name of the person that you are contacting. Do not use a generalized mail with greetings such as Dear Webmaster or Dear Blogger, etc. It will work out well by personalizing the mail to the individual person that you are contacting. You should also give them enough information about yourself so that your mail will look genuine. Introduce yourself properly and give them the necessary contact information including email address, website address and phone number.
This includes introducing yourself (if you have not had previous contact) and providing multiple contact details (website URL, phone number, etc).
Highlight the Benefits – No webmaster is obliged to respond to your request in a positive way. You must give them something in return for linking to you. So list all the benefits of linking to your blog or website. Just to ask for free links without offering them anything in return will make you sound too rude. If your website or blog does not have anything in particular to offer them as benefits, then you can create some impressive content that will be of use to their visitors in some way and inform them of presence of such content in your website which they can link to and benefit. If they see by linking to your website or to your blog their website visitors will benefit in a positive way then they will be more inclined to consider your request.
For instance, if you come across a blog post that poses questions on a certain topic, then you can provide the required solution that are supported by facts in your blog and request the blog to link to your website or blog which provides a solution to the problem raised by their blog.
Tags: Link Building, real estate seo
Webmasters are generally smart, because they know the users who frequently come back to their site because of the quality of the content. Webmasters are smart, they can tell if someone want to leave a comment for link juice, or if the person if truly interested in the conversation or blog and if the person can add quality comments to the website. Webmasters also want someone who cares about unique quality content. I have developed many great relationships but have not asked for a link. It’s not about the link, it’s about knowledge and building relationships with people in the same industry to get knowledge and stay ahead of the pack! Sometimes you just get lucky and pickup a link along the way. My motto is friends first, links last.
It’s so easy to forget how quickly all this tech changes. We learn something and often take for granted that next week or next month it will be the same. So you bring up an excellent point when you say what functions today may be broken tomorrow.
I did have a question though. You talk about “highlighting the benefits” of link building. Sometimes it’s difficult to get your voice to stand out in a massive sea of voices as webmasters have become more wary of these contacts. Other than providing content that solves people’s problems, what other suggestions do you have? Is being ethical and informative enough?
When you do pick up a link and say its a pr of 2-5 when will it actually help your SEO
1. Right away
2. At the next time Google crawls your site
3. or when the new pr comes out
Another question that I have and you might have a post about it but and I don’t want to seem like I am spamming (although I do like the Link)
Every agent around me as a pr of 1 they have not figured the SEO concept out or don’t care but anyway
If I build up to say a pr of 3 will and use proper keywords should that kick me to top of the list?
There is an agent locally that has a 10 year + domain
My content is better
My backlinks are better
But she is still in front so it has to be domain age
her pr is 1 and mine is 1 but if I get to 3 will I start coming before her
I mean her content is terrible and hasn’t changed in months if not years
Sorry this is off topic
@ Cary NC “Is being ethical and informative enough?” Yes, it can be, you just have to be heard in the correct places.
For instance, we all know blogging and blogging regularly is a valuable thing to do. We can all agree that getting mentioned on a local NBC website would be great. Even more-so if the news channel constantly promoted there real estate section on their T.V. commercial.
Would be even GREATER if the NBC site decided that you provided great content and was worthy to be placed on their real estate section via your RSS reader. Well guess what?? We’ve managed to get this done on several occasions
Check it out http://www.nbcdfw.com/around-town/real-estate/ every post that we publish gets added automatically to one of our local most trafficked websites.
While the links offer limited value, since they are temporary, the FREE traffic is Great!
@ Barry
Usually links will take affect shortly after the site is crawled from where you received the link.
One thing to keep in mind, is that page rank means very little. This is why you’ll see PR 2 & 3 sites that outrank PR 4-5′s. You are correct about domain age, Google does like older domains. However, this is fairly easy to overcome, with great content and a decent backlink portfolio.
Nice post,Its true real estate seo will be always beneficial for real estate industry.wonderful post. Its really informative and will help me lot. Thanks for posting.
Like Barry, the top local competition I face has a PR1, while my site is a PR2 yet, they rank very much higher owing to a more diverse set of inbound links. I’m plugging away at diversifying, increasing, and improving the links that point to my sites, and am slowly seeing progress (thank goodness!).