#9 of the:
The 10 Myths about Real Estate SEO
- PageRank & Metatags are everything
- A top ten position will solve all your sales problems
- SEO is metatag manipulation
- Content is King
- The engines love blogs more than regular webpages
- Get ranked for the top 20 most voluminous words and you will be successful
- If you just get rankings and Traffic you will be Successful
- SEO is the single most important action you can do for your website
- Its all about more links!
- There are magical shortcuts to getting SEO traffic
It all about the links.
Yes and No. After a judicious use of SEO optimizing on your keyword rich pages, its all about links.
Actually it depends on the engine. As far as Google is concerned it is about your Title Tag and your Links. A link is weighted by its reputation (anchor text or in human language meaning what your link says; click here or city home for sale), and contrary to popular disinformation, Page Rank. The other engines tend to put more weight into what is on the page.
So if you want to go after all engines you have to get content on many pages and link from many sources.
Links can come from other sites recognizing your great content, it can come from link trades, others in blog rolls and or posts, directories and syndication.
Link Sources
1. Great Content-This is really what you would like. In the competitive word of real estate this is easier than you might think. The vast majority of Realtors who create content say very little about their local market and issues. Instead, they attempt to pontificate on the matters beyond any economic benefit that they might receive.
I see blog posts and articles all the time that offer advice on SEO written by a Realtor. I see generalized attempts at discussing national Realty issues without illustrating its local impact on the person that would want to "employ" the writer.
2. Link Trades-This is a losing battle as Google's algo forces you to continue trading, and when you stop, any benefit is lost. Besides that it really uglifies a site.
Link trades can still work though. Just do them thru content swaps. If you want a link, offer an article for a link back. The article is a benefit to the page so the search engine will see this as natural. You can also do three way trades where A links to B who links to C. But those kind of things give me a headache!
3. Directories-Get your site into the directories. They are a source of many 1 way links. There are many real estate directories.
4. Articles. Articles are the secret weapon amongst online marketers for easy one way links. They are natural because they are original content.
Just don't post a bunch of what I call "real estate drivel". You know the crud that was out pre-internet back when I was in the business. Stuff like, "It is a great time to refi when...", "When to Go Fixed VS ARM". This stuff has been beaten to death and you more than likely will not do the subject justice.
Write about your market. You can take those same topics above and write about them and how they apply to your market. That would be a winner.We run a new Article Directory just for real estate. You can submit your article for free. And we are working on getting the inbound links and Page Rank high so your site will benefit from our link equity!
6. Others- I would not do this justice without listing other great sources for lower impact links like blog commenting, forums, and social bookmarking sites like Fark , real estate bookmarks and My Favorite Real Estate. Don't forget to make sure that you write something of value when commenting as it can be a terrific way to get visitors to follow your link over to find out more about your business.
So links are a HUGE part of your traffic program, but be careful on how you spend your time linking. Many are being led into spending all their time in Social Networks but it is only a start and a very small part of a larger puzzle. Some bloggers just spend time commenting on other sites and blog rolling (trading).
So get links, but get a variety of links not just to your main page, but also internally with a variety of keyword anchor texts.
