Many real estate agents know that one way to increase their rankings for their real estate website is to gain additional links that point back to their website. With this in mind, many SEO and Real Estate Web Design Companies are quick to add link building to their list of design and development services. But the reality is that simply building links isn’t the answer. The real value comes by building Online Endorsements. So what’s the difference? Link Building is simply trying to “game the system.” It focuses on the SEO value instead of the “People Value.” Let me give you a few examples…
The Wrong Way To Do It
You want to gain another link to your real estate website so you decide to develop a Squidoo Page. Most people will be tempted to just do a “hurry up” job by copying and pasting some information about themselves from their website and then linking back to their home page. Or maybe they even go as far as customizing the content by swapping out a few words here and there.
Let’s look at this from both a “People Value” perspective and a “Search Engine Value” perspective. First, from a Search Engine Value: Our good friend GoogleBot looks find the Squidoo page. Even though the content has been changed he uses his complex algorithms to analyze the content right down to sentence structure (yes, they filed a patent about this years ago) and immediately recognizes that the content is just a rehash of your about us page from your website. On top of that, Googlebot sees that the content doesn’t provide any valuable information such as new real estate facts, a how to, or anything else worthy of appearing at the top of the search engines. Googlebot just sees this as another advertisement page with duplicate content and moves on. Ouch! So what about the “People Value” perspective? When a web visitor arrives at the page, they too see just a bland self-promotion page. No real information that aids in their real estate experience. Frustrated, they just move on. It’s a good thing it didn’t take you long to develop this Squidoo page. Because the page you created gave no value to search engines or visitors. Now let’s look at an example of true resource for both Website Visitors and Search Engines.
The Right Way To Do It
I am very familiar with this example as it’s an example that I personally implemented. As a real estate web designer, I always try to keep up with the latest news about the Real Estate Industry as well as the Web Design and Development Industry. So my eyes lit up when I read Jay Izso’s ePowerNews article about how Internet Savvy Buyers use Real Estate Websites in their home buying decision. I knew this was a great topic that I could expand on. So I jumped on Squidoo and created a page about Real Estate Website Statistics. I pulled all the data, designed a few custom graphs to make it visually appealing to visitors, and made sure my titles were SEO friendly. At the end of the page, I tied in the information to my company and linked to the Dakno Marketing home page. I was sure to include the anchor text Real Estate Web Design, as that was the keyword I was optimizing for. When my old friend GoogleBot arrived at the new Squidoo page, he saw lots of original content about a subject matter that he knew little about. He soaked up every word, happy that there was a true resource for the information. Before I knew it, Googlebot had me ranked at the top of Google and started sending visitors to the Squidoo page. The visitors were glad to see useful content (not just a self promotion) complete with custom designed graphs. They knew that if I gave them all this great information about Real Estate Statistics on this page, that I would probably have even more useful information about Real Estate Marketing on my website. So the majority of the visitors followed my link over to my website. A few even called wanting web design services. It was a win, win, win situation for me, Search Engines and visitors.
So remember, it’s not about building links. Link building adds no value to Search Engines or Visitors. The real value comes out of building Resource Rich, Online Endorsements. Don’t settle for second best. Visitors and Search Engines won’t!
Great post! I am gonna share it with my own blog readers at jason.landbrokr.com ! Thanks.
I think you are dead on with this post. I would add that one needs to think like a search engine when building a website, taking into consideration some very basic points, but build the site to look and feel human friendly. A seemingly diametrically opposed task, but completely possible 🙂 Thanks for the great post.