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Real Estate SEO - A Look At Inbound Links

As websites continue to become an integral part of a real estate agent's customer service offerings it is clear that new skills have to be acquired by agents wanting to participate in this new field of the business.

Having a website with MLS (Multiple Listing Service) search and customer registration is only the start of capturing lucrative leads from potential buyers. To generate traffic to your site you will either have to have deep pockets for paying pay-per-click campaigns or optimize the site so that search engines show your website as a result for specific searches.

If your target is to naturally rank higher in the three most important search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN it is imperative that you actively work on improving the criteria that lead the computer algorithms at these search engines to ranking your websites on their first search engine results page (SERP).

One of the most important concepts to grasp in this respect is inbound links. Everyone is familiar with hyperlinks that lead from one page to another or an entirely new website. A link that originates at another website or domain and points at any page of your site is called an inbound link. Search engines consider these links a vote for your site. In general: the more votes the better.

But not all votes (links) are created equal. The more important the site that links to yours is, the higher the value of their vote. You can check the importance of pages by installing the google toolbar in your IE browser. The page rank scale is show in values from 0 to 10, higher being better.

It is believed that links from website that are in the same line of business have a larger weight than links from unrelated businesses. So links from other real estate site are viewed as more valuable than links from lets say a bicycle manufacturer.

To get inbound links, real estate agents quickly reverted to merely exchanging the favor between sites. I give you a link if you give me a link. The SEO community widely believes that search engines discount these links to a large extend. Not completely, but they seem to have less weight if links are merely exchanged. Nevertheless it is one way to get started.

To prevent its web spiders to index links from a webpage, google introduced the HTML NOFOLLOW tag. Every browser lets you display the source code of a webpage. You do not need to understand what is coded there, just do a search for the word NOFOLLOW. If it is before a link then it is as if that link does not exist. Make sure when you exchange links that the other site does not employ this tactic of not giving credit where credit is due.

Another excellent way of getting so called one-way links as opposed to link exchanges or two-way-links, is to write high quality articles on your fields of expertise and deliver them to article distribution outlets. The articles can then be used by websites and newsletters on the condition of giving the author credit by linking to his/her website.

You can check your inbound links in the advanced search tab of Google search. See the LINK field in the page specific search. Just enter your website and you will be presented with a list of links linking to you.

Improving your inbound link is a very time consuming process. You will have to spend time and resources to convince people to link to you or to offer them something of value in return for a link. Be persistent and you will reap the rewards over time.