Real Estate Link Building

[tonynoriega]

Im working on a real estate site and this industry is a bit new to me for link building..

i have a page that links to local sites like some .gov and .edu sites, but what are some good methods for real estate link building?

i dont want to buy links, and competing real estate agency sites i dont think is good marketing...

any tips?

[jimbeetle]

If this is a site for a brick and mortar real estate business the best bet is to go after the usual local suspects: chamber of commerce, rotary, fraternal and social orgs, butcher, baker, alumni and church groups - anybody, anywhere that the brokers and agents do business and socialize with.

On the other hand, if it's a virtual business, good real estate link building can be quite difficult. The best suggestion I have is a negative one: There are many bad neighborhoods out there in the real estate world and in the past couple of years the major SEs, especially Google and Yahoo, have droppped tons of real estate sites from the indexes. So be sure to thoroughly investigate any potential link partners. Use Yahoo site explorer to check links a generation or two removed to find any hinky link patterns. You'll be surprised how easy it is to spot link networks, dodgy directories and such with the naked eye (just think how easy it is for G and Y).

Another suggestion would be virtual travel and hotel guides that cover the area or, for that matter, sussing out any other virtual businesses that have some sort of local component.

[cnvi]

Linking for real estate has evolved over the years. A number of years ago, agents would simply link to every other agent in the country in an attempt to inflate their link popularity which led to crackdowns by major search engines.

We have never recommended to our clients to link with every other agent in the country. We teach our clients to link for traffic and the end user.

Real Estate Agents should consider linking up with the following types of businesses in their local geographical area:

- Mortgage brokers
- Moving companies
- Storage companies
- Interior decorators
- Home inspectors
- Locksmiths
- Handymen
- Cleaning services

etc... anything related to buying or selling a home is fair game.

We have an agent client who came to us wanting to generate links for her new agent web site in a very competitive market in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. She started with PR=null and no rankings in February on a brand new domain. We created link categories similar to the ones suggested above. We obtained about 150 relevant links from decent websites in her local geographical area in the segments I suggested above. Seven months later, shes got PR=5 and top 6 in her rankings for competitive keywords in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. We are encouraging her to not stop there and to continue to obtain and provide links to relevant businesses in her geographic area. Her website analytics shows about 28% of her inbound traffic comes from the link exchanges themselves.

Link building via link exchange for real estate still works, but you have to dispense with linking with every other agent in the country. Stick with link exchanges that benefit your local end user. Your mileage will vary of course.