Real Estate SEO

Posts Tagged ‘links’

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.

It’s no secret that linking is very important for good SEO. This is true whether you’re in real estate or not.

2 types of linking are important:

1. Internal link structures - these are the links that are a part of your site. I’m talking about the links from one page of your site to another.
2. Inbound linking - These are links from other sites on the web to your website.

The internal links on your website are often referred to as your internal linking structure. In other words, if you draw a schematic of the pages of your site and how they link to one another. The pages should start to form some kind of a logical structure. That’s your website’s internal linking structure.

Now, most of us are SEOing around multiple terms. We’ve written before about the fact that good SEO usually focuses on many terms, not just a few. In order for your site to rank well for a term, the search engines need to know that your site has information that is relevant to that term. So, your site needs to contain pages with information on that term. In other words, the content on those pages needs to be about the search term of interest.

Now, let’s say you do have a number of pages on your real estate website and they are all about the real estate market in a specific town. You might have a page that lists all of the currently available real estate listings in that town. You would also have a details page for each listing. You might also have a page of market data and another page of recent sales and details pages for each of those recently sold properties.

What you really want to do is create a pyramid structure using your internal links. So, first make sure that all of these many pages which all contain some content related to the town in question are well constructed and optimized pages. Pick the page that is the most important or the best for your business and make sure that all of these pages with unique content on listings, the market, sold data, etc, all point back to that one page that is your main page for the term.

Now, your linking structure, were you to draw it out on a piece of paper, should probably look like a pyramid. All of these many pages with great content are all pointing to the top of the pyramid. This sends a strong message to the search engines that this is the very important page with information that is relevant to your SEO term.

To conclude, I’ll tell you why this is easier for real estate seo campaigns. If your real estate website is built well, you should have lots of great dynamic pages that are generated from your MLS database. These pages, if they are optimized, should include relevant content and links back to that page at the top of the pyramid. In other words, much of the work will be done for you, simply by having a site that is constructed properly for real estate SEO.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to submit a comment.