Real Estate SEO

Archive for the ‘Link Building’ Category

Ever wonder how some blogs seem to be cranking out posts every single day and you see their content everywhere. Part of the magic of Real Estate SEO is to share the best ways for you to leverage your web presence through your blog…and I’m going to let you in on something good…the secret is in the sauce.

Really though there is no mystique about it. What you have to do, if you want to have a successful blog, the main thing obviously is to write regularly, but, here’s the kicker, you need to be willing to share some of the ingredients to your secret sauce. Give people the inside scoop, share with them how things work…empower your readers.

I recently came across a great article that posed a whole bunch of questions that realtors can answer through their blog, these are just some of the ways that you can share your secrets (you should read the full post when you have time, but here’s a snippet):

Ideas on things to share with your readers…

1. About Me-Introduce yourself to the world by creating a biography for your blog. Include your experience level, education, accomplishments, affiliations, and interests. Tell visitors why they should choose you to buy or sell their home. This will sell you to potential clients so keep it professional!
2. How to Sell Your Home in a Buyer’s Market-HOT topic!
3. How to Convince a Seller to Accept Your Offer
4. Why You Should Hire a Real Estate Professional to Sell Your Home
5. What to Look for When Purchasing a Foreclosure or Short Sale-HOT topic!
6. Staging Your Home for a Speedy Sale
7. Why You Should Buy A Home Now in (enter your farm area here)
8. How to Price Your Home for a Quick Sale-HOT topic!
9. What is a Conventional Mortgage?
10. What To Avoid When Remodeling Your Home
11. What is an Adjustable Rate Mortgage?
12. Why You Need A Real Estate Professional To Buy A Home
13. How To Use A CMA: For Sellers
14. How To Use A CMA: For Buyers
15. The Closing Process: For Sellers
16. The Closing Process: For Buyers
17. What is a FHA-insured mortgage?
18. What You Should Know About (enter your farm area here)-go to www.bestplaces.net for statistics and information on your farm area
19. Why You Should Be Buying Instead of Renting
20. New Homes vs. Existing Homes-Which One Is Right For You?
21. 5 Things You Can Do Now To Increase Your Home’s Resale Value
22. Why Now Is The Best Time To Buy Real Estate in (enter your farm area here)
23. How Rising Foreclosure Rates Affect Your Home’s Value-HOT topic!
24. How To Choose The Right Home For You
25. Negotiating with a Seller in a Buyer’s Market-HOT topic!
26. Do You Qualify For A VA Mortgage?
27. How To Properly Prepare To Purchase A Home
28. How To Know How Much Home You Can Afford
29. How To Use Technology To Find Your New Home Now
30. How To Invest in (enter your farm area here) Real Estate

Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

Readers come to you for answers. You are the expert! So you need to position yourself as one. They come to you for guidance and to seek your opinion. Sharing the how to’s and answers to the what if’s (regularly) will make your blog a worthy investment and a great source for link bait to boot.

Are there any other questions you can think of? Let us know.

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. A quick way to find out is do a search for your domain name “www.domain.com” (with the quotes).

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 engines suggest that you do everything to maintain a good standing and then give you the option to resubmit your site for reinclusion.

While the promise of easy link building through link exchanges or link farms is tempting, these tactics often achieve subpar results. 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.

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We are all pretty much on the same page when we say that SEO is organic and that you want to naturally receive traffic from search engines. But how do we get those inbound links? When do they start flowing in? Do I get them myself? Where do I get them? Do I pay for them? Help….

Don’t fret. Here are a few tips that will hopefully put your mind at ease:

1. Links will and should come naturally. Organic links  are when someone likes your content enough to link to it.
2. Quality content naturally draws quality links. The more quality content the more those links will come in. Keep writing.
3. Create viral content (aka. link bait), often this will be free or offered without having to sign up for it… something helpful to your readers.
4. Don’t always be too serious, offer something fun or cool (as relevant to your business).
5. Have a tool on your site or a widget of sorts that will inspire others to share that information.
6. Have your partners, supporters or other networks link to you (not necessarily always in exchange but because they want to help promote you).
7. Create quality profiles. Don’t just create accounts that never get used, but set up profiles where you will actually be and remain active in a community.
8. Add yourself to quality directories like the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ.org (a few times when it will be ok to have paid links)
9. …which reminds me, don’t pay someone to get you a ton of links and don’t add your site to link farms.
10. Actively share your content and that of others, links will flow naturally from there as well.

How many ways do you think Social Media can contribute to good real estate SEO? Jot down a list and then compare it to mine. If I left off any major ones, please let me know. Here goes:

1. Blogs are social media. Blogs only get read when there’s new content. New content helps your search engine placement.
2. You can syndicate your content (let’s say from your blog) to social media sites. You could even feed your real estate listings, by RSS to your twitter and Facebook profiles.
3. Many social media site pages are public. These pages are bound to have links back to your site. Linking will improve your SEO.
4. Social bookmarking links on your site will produce back links from those sites (Digg, Reddit, Stumble, etc.) to your site. Again, these links will improve your SEO, your rank, and bring you more traffic and more leads. Remember real estate buyer and seller leads are the goal, not just ranking!
5. Users spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media sites. The referral traffic will help you gain more visitors, more clients and sell more real estate.
6. Promotions have more power with social media. Post a promotion on your site, edit your PPC ads accordingly to drive clicks, broadcast the promotion to your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections and watch your traffic spike.
7. Remember that real estate SEO is about leads and customers. What you care about isn’t always ranking but leads and real estate transactions that come from those leads. Use your analytics system, like Google analytics,  to look at the social media sites that are driving traffic and leads to your site. My money says that you’ll see a good conversion rate on this traffic.
8. Chatter on Facebook and Twitter can fuel your blog. Look at what the people are saying about your real estate market, your real estate business, even you as a real estate agent. You’re likely to get inspired and find a topic to blog about. Also, here’s another post about blogging inspiration that could be helpful.
9. Social media is all about linking and showing the world what you’re up to. As a result, your friends and followers are likely to check out the stuff that you’re pointing them to. So, engage your community, send them to your site - full of great resources and information - and they’ll convert into leads.

Ok, that about exhausts my list of how Social Media can improve your Real Estate SEO. I’m sure there are many others that I forgot, but I have to get back to SEOing a couple of sites today. I look forward to your additions to my list. Leave them as comments please. Thanks.

Real Estate offices are, all too often, made up of agents who are in competition with one another. The reason for this is quite basic really. The compensation structure of most offices doesn’t foster team work.

But, without changing the way your entire office works, I want to give you some suggestions on how each member of your team can put in a little work each month to help your office website rank better in the search engines. If you have the right systems setup, then you’ll see more leads for everyone.

1. Make sure there’s at least one link on your real estate agent site to your real estate office’s site.  Inbound linking is very helpful when you’re trying to SEO a site. The best links for your real estate seo will be from other real estate websites to your site.
   1. Make sure the link is HTML text and not an image.
   2. Compose the text of the link carefully. If you practice real estate in Newport, then the text of the link should read “Newport Real Estate” or “Newport Homes.” If you practice in Boston, then the link might read “Boston Real Estate”  or “Boston Condos.” Choose terms for which you’d like your office site to appear higher in the search engine results and make that the text in the link.
2. Start an office blog and divvy up the writing assignments. The average real estate office in the USA has 10 agents working in it. If each agent writes a post every other month, then your blog will be well populated before you know it and you’ll start to see reader traffic, comments, and leads. Here are some tips on how to make that blog engaging. Also, if you didn’t know that blogging was good for real estate SEO, there are plenty of posts on this blog that will explain why and how to do it better.
3. Each agent in your office should use social bookmarking websites to promote your site and each post to your blog. Every real estate agent and even the admins in your office should learn how to use StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and other social bookmarking sites. When a new post goes up, a few members of your staff should bookmark each post on each of these sites. This should take no more than a couple of minutes. Have a look at the bottom of this post and you’ll see links to lots of social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking will bring referral traffic to your site and the backlinks will help your search engine ranking.
4. Make sure every agent in your office has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. Make sure the office has a page on these sites too and that you’re all fans of or connected to the office page. If you don’t know how that works or if the last sentence I wrote makes no sense to you, you need to learn more about social media sites. Call Boston Logic immediately. Social networking sites are a great source of referral traffic, don’t miss out on these visitors!
5. Aggregate email lists. Make sure the office is sending out a newsletter at least once a month. The content can be pulled from or at least reused on the blog you’re going to start.

Ok, these are all simple SEO tasks that just about any agent in your office should be able to do. If you’re reading this post and thinking how great it would be to get the whole office behind an effort like this, just remember that people love to follow leadership. Be the leader in your real estate office who starts the organic SEO effort. Your colleagues will thank you.

Have a great weekend.