Real Estate SEO: Link Building 101 Continued
Link building for your site is not just about gaining a large number of inbound links, but rather a good number of quality links (quality not quantity). I recently wrote a post about gaining quality links during your natural or organic real estate SEO campaign’s life cycle. We got some great questions in response to that article and so I am going to drill down into some of the questions and provide you with more feedback on how to improve your campaign:
Why does my Real Estate site need links? Links are an essential part to your web presence, while quality links do take longer to get, the best way to get them is to actively maintain your real estate seo campaign with content writing and publishing as a huge part of that. Actively publishing quality content is the best way to get those links.
Why links? Because you do not want your website to exist in a vacuum. In addition to establishing visibility for your business and direction for your users, your links help establish credibility for your website. A link is almost like a vote, and thus with each incoming link to your site you get a vote…someone saying “Hey, look at this site. It has great information that I want to share with you. Go see for yourself!”
What kind of places should I avoid submitting links to? Two words; “Link Farms.” This seems to be particularly popular in the real estate field (though not everyone). While some of these tactics worked at one time, search engines have become more sophisticated. If you see sites that appear to be spam you should report them and not engage.
Link farms are sites that will link to every page submitted, anyone and everyone gets accepted. Some good key indicators are that they have no or poor PageRank scores (use this tool to check Google’s PR), display paid advertisement (quality directories never have advertising), and often do not offer very detailed categories or specialty areas. Most link farms or spammers will also require you to place a link on your site in exchange (again quality directories do not ask this) … run when you see this.
What if I have engaged with spam sites? You should remove any links to them and request to have yourself removed. Unfortunately there is no quick way to remedy mistakes of the past. Time is your best ally. Quality SEO practices are what will help you gain trust again, and this can take several months and even several years for you to catch up.
How do I find out whether my real estate site has been banned? This is a simple check. You would know because your site would no longer be indexed, meaning that it would no longer appear in search results.
I actually recommend, if you are not currently using any sort of tools, like Google’s Webmasters, that you perform a search on your site regularly. It will also show you what links are associated with your site, which can easily help you see the kinds of sites with which you are being associated.
If you have been banned Search Recon Florida that you do everything to maintain a good standing and then give you the option to resubmit your site for reinclusion.
Exchanging links with other bloggers Is the best factor. Natural, organic inbound links from sites that your competitors can’t get links from are the best way to perform well in the long term. Patience my friend is the name of the game…and trust that as you continue to optimize and maintain your real estate SEO campaign, by adding quality and relevant content, links will indeed come naturally.
