Jul
12
Why you really need links to your real estate website
Publishing interesting content on your property blog and website won’t count for much unless people get to see it. And an essential part of driving traffic to your real estate web pages is to obtain a growing amount of links from other sites.
Of course, these links will themselves direct people to your website, but they also serve a very important function when it comes to boosting your rankings in the search engines. You see, one way the search engines determine how relevant and important your web pages are is by examining the links to those pages. In a nutshell, a link is like a vote of confidence - the more incoming links a webpage has, and the more important the sites that link to the webpage are, the more important the web page is considered to be.
This is why you should set a long-term goal of getting as many incoming links as possible pointing to your website and blog. Of course, this is not something that will happen overnight and you should start accumulating links as soon as your new website is up, so that with time you will benefit from better search engine rankings.
How to network your way to link success
We’ve already discussed using Social Media Marketing to get your property website out there, and now we add some more tips on how to network with other websites to get more links to your own:
1) Make sure you have content that’s really worth linking to. We’ve probably said this a hundred times and we’ll say it again.
2) Find out who is linking to your real estate competitors and approach them about a possibly exchanging links with you too. This is easy to do - in Google, search for ‘linkto: domain.com’, (without the quotes) ,replacing domain.com with the address of the website you are examining.
3) Look for free Internet directories that are either specifically about real estate or about businesses in your area and add your website to them. A good way to start if you are, say, in the Canary Islands would be to search Google for ‘Canary Islands directory’ or ‘Canary islands businesses’, and of course ‘real estate directory’.
4) Exchanging links with estate agents in other areas is another great way to build your inbound links, and at the same time potentially win some traffic from people visiting other real estate websites that are not in competition with yours.
5) Let other bloggers know about any company news or blog posts that might interest their readers (be very picky here - don’t just send them any old thing). Also, get to know which general blogs write about your area, or neighbourhood, and which real estate bloggers could be interested in the topics you cover, and build a relationship with them. Then, when you have something newsworthy to share or you have written a relevant blog post, you simply drop them an e-mail to let them know, in the hope that they will blog about you and link to your website. Obviously, you should also reciprocate by writing about their own posts.
6) Discover which Internet forums deal with the area you work in or with real estate in general, and participate actively in them, answering questions and offering advice to other users. Resist the temptation to indulge in blatant self-promotion, as this is considered spam - your kickback will come from including links to your website and blog in your forum signature that will appear at the bottom of every forum post you write.
7) Linking from your own website to your blog and vice versa is also important for link building, both if they are in different domains or not. This one is not really networking, but it’s so often forgotten that it’s worth a mention here.
There you go! And remember, you don’t have to do it all at once. Set yourself a goal that you can manage, like getting 5 new links every day and bit by bit it will all add up.
Alternatively, contact us at Sorted Sites for help with your link building.
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