Real Estate Agent and Brokerage Blogs

The web is nothing but a collection of independent web pages connected to one another through links.  The ways in which you use links to connect your pages to each other and to the outside web are just as important as how other website link back to you. Using links properly can increase visitor retention, leads, search positioning and even PageRank. Unlock the power of your links by learning everything you need to know about links today.

Read also:How to generate leads from your real estate blog: we have proof

Forward links

Forward links are the links that you provide from your webpage to other websites out on the Net. 

Benefits of forward linking:

• Shows search engines you play well with others
• Helps to acquire backlinks (if webmasters see that you linked to them and that link is driving measurable traffic back to their site, they may reciprocate the link by linking back to you)

The golden rules of forward linking:

Provide valuable anchor text: According to Wikipedia, anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

Your link is more valuable to another site if it contains quality anchor text. For example, instead of using 'click here' or 'RSS Pieces' in the anchor text of a link off to a site about real estate blogs, use 'real estate blogs' or 'real estate blogging.' Try to load anchor text with keywords specific to the other sites primary business. That makes both webmasters and search engines happy. Now, this very same theory applies to the links from other sites back to yours- you want them to be keyword dense. In the section on backlinking, there is a cool tool for retrieving all your backlinks with their respective anchor text, so you can see how people are linking to you.

Dont link to a bad neighborhood: Make sure the sites you link to are not bad neighborhoods. Nothing will dampen your credibility to search engines faster than linking off to a site that is considered a bad neighborhood. You want to link off to sites that either have a similar or higher PageRank than your own.

Dont place link farms on your website:

According to Wikipedia, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamexing or spamdexing).

Search engines have become extremely savvy to link farms and have begun to drop pages with link farms from their index. Google generally drops any page that has more than 120 links on it from its primary index. The fact is, link farming is a very old way of building site authority. It is a dinosaur in the SEO world, and will harm you far more than help you. If you have one on your site- get rid of it TODAY!

Tool: Find all the forward links on your domain

Tool: See if your site is linking to a bad neighborhood

Tool: PageRank checker

Read also: Are you linking to a bad neighborhood?

Internal links

Internal links are those links on your site to other pages within your site. Now, listen close, boys and girls, because this is the key to the kingdom of visitor retention: every time you write a new post, link to another related post on your site. Why? It keeps people on your site and the longer people stay on your site, the more likely they are to contact you or fill out one of your lead generation tools. 

Have you ever noticed how I constantly link to other related articles on the RSS Pieces site in my blog posts? Yep, thats right, I am manipulating people into spending more time on my blog, and that is what you want to do too! 

The formula:

Internal links = visitor retention = leads

Tool: Internal link analysis tool

Backlinks

According to Wikipedia, Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also called incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Search engines value both quality and quantity of backlinks. To optimize for all the major search engines you need BOTH quality and quantity backlinks.  Preferably, a quantity of quality backlinks. What a mouthful. Basically, you need links from other sites that are related to yours that carry a decent PageRank and authority with the search engines. For example, in real estate you may need other real estate, mortgage and home decor related sites to link to you as well as local information, education and shopping websites. Build quality backlinks slowly and naturally over time- so, dont go out and buy 10,000 links somewhere that wont do you much good and may even get you knocked out of Googles index temporarily.   

Read also: Ultimate guide to building backlinks

Read also: How different search engine value links and meta tags

Tool: find the number of backlinks to your domain

Tool: find the actual backlinks with anchor text to your domain

Deep Links (always refers to backlinks)

Deep links are links from other websites to pages other than your homepage on your site. Deep links are more valued links than a homepage link because it shows a search engine that the content you provide throughout your site is truly valuable to users. You want to constantly grow your deep links by seeding your posts through social news sites like Digg, Reddit, NewsVine and RealEstateVoices.

Tool: Deep link ratio analysis tool

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