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.

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.

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.

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.

Below are the top 100 real estate and social media sites. Enjoy!

1. Facebook

One of the fastest social networking sites. Facebook is one of the easiest ways of finding prospective customers within any given area. Using Facebook, we can target very specific groups according to our business needs; such a high level of targeting is not a possibility with other social networking sites or community sites. We can find our customers based on specific set of criteria including place, age etc.

2. Localism

This is a very niche based community site. At Localism, we can interact with the local merchants. This is one of the best examples of social networking at a micro level. People of the same place get together to share the happenings of their community. This community site is not only for the merchants and business people but it is also for common people. Neighborpedia is the extension of Localism.

3. Trulia

This is one of the top-rated sites for marketing any real estate related services. It has been estimated that Trulia attracts around 5 million potential buyers and sellers each month that are interested in real estate property in some way. Trulia Pro offers highly comprehensive marketing solutions for realtors as well as for professionals from the other fields who want to market their brand online.

4. ActiveRain

ActiveRain is one of the few networking sites that are exclusively meant for real estate professionals. We can make use of this real estate community site free of cost and its membership counts to 98,000 and still growing. We can post our profile online using the free membership. Making use of their referral service, it is possible to get in touch with the top real estate professionals and leads from both local real estate market and outside. The referral service allows us to search the local markets within each county.

5. RealTown

RealTown.com is one of the top real estate portals, which serves as a perfect meeting place for real estate buyers and sellers. This site offers a lot of useful resources for the real estate professionals as well as for people that are interested in buying and selling real estate properties.

6. FlippingPap

If you are a real estate investor who is interested in building relationship with other investors then FlippingPad is the place to be. FlippingPad provides a unique opportunity for the wholesalers whereby they can find many prospective leads. We will be able to interact with the investors using the forums. We can post our doubts, take part in discussions, which makes it a very interactive site.

7. LinkedIn

Almost all realtors will have an account in LinkedIn. This is one of the most happening places on the internet. Professionals from all fields want to be part of this network. This is a very sophisticated network with many tools and in built tools that we can use to interact with the other members. You can send invitations for others to join your network and send requests to other members to join their network. People can find us by our name or by using specific industry related keywords.

8. Puurple

Puurple is almost like Digg.com. We will be able to find and vote for posts that are related to real estate.

9. Zillow

Zillow allows us to search for homes in any given locality. We will also be able checkout on the homes that are recently sold out and their prices.

10. Zolve

This is another useful platform that serves as the meeting place for the buyers and sellers from the real estate industry based area.

11. Real Estate Webmasters

Realestatewebmasers.com has an exclusive section for realtors whereby realtors can interact with the local as well as global real estate professionals.

12. WannaNetwork

Wannanetwork.com is one of the high traffic real estate community sites. Here we can create new groups and also join the existing groups. This community networking site allows us to freely interact with the other members interested in the real estate industry. There is a lot of knowledge sharing here.

13. RealEstateForum.com

You can ask real estate related questions in the forums and get your answers. You can also start a discussion on a hot topic or take part in other discussions. You will be able learn a lot about the real estate industry by becoming a member here.

14. Brokeragentsocial.com

This community site has over 20,000 members. It is totally dedicated to the real estate industry. You will find everything relating to this industry from property talk to mortgage.

15. Inman

If you want to find the latest news about real estate industry, this is the first site you should visit. You can also become a member in this site and interact with the other members who share same interests. This site is again all about the real estate industry.

# 16 – 100 I decided to keep to myself, or we’ll add a second post.

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.

Real estate social media sites are communities where Realtors meet-up and share real estate related information.

So how can Realtors use these platforms and benefit from them?

• social sites generate traffic to your site
• extra visibility and branding
• one-way links

I know if your reading this blog you mainly want to know about the one-way links . Below are a few real estate social media sites what are great for building 1st relationships with other Realtors and 2nd building some nice one-way links back to your website.

1. ActiveRain

2. WannaNetwork

3. RealTown

4. Zillow

5. Property Hogs

6. FlippingPad

7. Townizen