#9 of Real Estate SEO Myths

#9 of the:

The 10 Myths about Real Estate SEO

1. PageRank & Metatags are everything
2. A top ten position will solve all your sales problems
3. SEO is metatag manipulation
4. Content is King
5. The engines love blogs more than regular webpages
6. Get ranked for the top 20 most voluminous words and you will be successful
7. If you just get rankings and Traffic you will be Successful
8. SEO is the single most important action  you can do for your website
9. Its all about more links!
10. 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.

The 10 Myths about Real Estate SEO

Comments

[Risa and David Weiss]

Yep, getting links through blog comments (just like the one generated through this comment!)is an easy way to get started.

Of course, it helps to have some content on the other side of the link. Hopefully, it will be something of enough interest to garner a mention and a link somewhere else down the line (see below).

For bloggers, trackbacks are nice linking tools, Technorati.com, and any other aggregators of RSS content provide good links, too.

We have also noticed Yahoo Video entries popping up in the Google SERPs quite a bit lately (if you post videos, you can also have an RSS feed for those). Video is all the rage now, anyway, so agents who want to stay in business better get on the video ball. You don't want to find yourself competing against people like me in a listing presentation, and come up short because you don't or can't pitch your internet marketing and streaming video strategies effectively.

Speaking of video, I saw an agent blog where the agent was very proud that she was able to post a video. The content? Her grandkid blowing out candles on a birthday cake. The best part of the video? When the kid's mom leans into the shot, and exposes herself to the world. Funny that grandma Realtor didn't notice when she posted the video. Oops.

It's a start, I guess.

As I think about it, that could have been some GREAT link bait!

Which brings me back full-circle - it's about quality links, folks!

If I can find the blog with the birthday video again, I'll post a link.

[Risa and David Weiss]

Found it.

http://ardell.realtownblogs.com/other/xochitls-birthday-video/

[fastrealestate]

It's all about good links! The alogs are getting much better with relevancy. It's all about content and clean code. It helps to have aged links and a dmoz listing. An aged domain will work magic also.

http://www.fastrealestate.net

[Coach Tim SEO]

I think an aged domain is gold for high competition keywords.

[Risa and David Weiss]

You know, I've studied sites that rank above mine (in the few cases where that happens), and I try to be fairly objective. The only thing that I fall short on is the age of my domain, which is a bit over two years old.

There is nothing more frustrating than being out-ranked by what I would consider to be an inferior site whose only advantage is age.

For new agents just getting started, you can't expect any real traffic from Google for the first 6 months, at least. Sometimes, it's more like a year of waiting for Google to consider your site a "real" site, and worthy of inclusion into their results.

You just have to hammer away at it until it happens. In the mean time, consider shelling out $300-500 a month on pay-per-click ads in order to generate traffic.

It sounds like a lot of money, but that's the cost of doing business. Every year, at least one deal's worth of commission is going to go into promoting your web site.

[Risa and David Weiss]

I submitted to dmoz two years ago.

I'm still waiting.

Any ideas on how to get that process moving? According to everything I read, it's just "sit and wait" until someone gets around to looking at your site and including it.

[Coach Tim SEO]

Dave-
As far as DMOZ. Submit and move on and don't sweat it.Its only a link. A Link is a Link is a Link.

Nice budgeting analogy.

~T

[DowellTaggart]

I started working on content then linking to directories and high page rank real estate websites. My ranking in Google under my keywords went up. Now I'm in the first page in 30 of my keywords.