I like Mike Antoniak, and he has been good to me by
including me in his story that appeared in the September issue of REALTOR
Magazine. I also realize that he has a very limited space to work with in his
columns that appear in the magazine.
So, let me fill in the gaps a bit on his
article that is in the November issue of REALTOR Magazine.
Link building is a very important aspect to generating
better organic search engine results. But the common perception amongst
the REALTOR community is that the quantity of links is the only thing that
matters. The mindset has become that the agent with the most links
pointing to their site wins the game. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the number one measure of online popularity, and it is the reason why Google grew to be the most popular search engine. In a perfect world, it's the ideal measure of relevancy. We are certainly able therefore to try and make the websites we own more relevant than our competitors and beat them to the number one, or most relevant, item on the web.
In fact, if you follow the simplistic concept of "more
is better", you may actually behurting your search engine
rankings. What you should be looking for is inbound links that make your
site a hub of interest, with other, high quality sites in your line of
business linking to your site.
Think about these concepts:
Is your site considered a "hub" if all your links
are reciprocal links - ie you've traded links between your site and
others? Instead of being a "hub", you are part of a network
diagram of sites, with everyone being more or less equal. I have a link
to you, and you have a link to me. Generally this isn't good practice though. Google can catch reciprocal linking quite quickly, and a reciprocal link does not hold nearly the same value as a one way link.
Are the sites that are linking to you of high quality or are
they average sites of average importance (or low quality sites with low
importance)? It makes perfect sense that one high quality link from a
highly respected web site would hold more weight than several low quality
links from average or low quality sites. For example, is one link to your
web site from Realtor.org better than several from link farms - sites
whose only purpose is to create links to other sites (often for a fee)?
It's common wisdom in the search engine optimization crowd that link farms are
considered to be nothing more than spam by the search engines, and the search
engines don't like spam.
Personally, I try not to give out too many links to low
quality sites, and I also don't really look for reciprocal links. The
basic theory the highly ranked web sites work off of is that if you provide
good content and keep your site fresh with unique and useful information, you
will naturally build a network of sites that link to yours without having the
need to create a "spammy" reciprocal link in return.
Another great way to get some quality links is to write some articles about your industry, in our case the real estate industry, and then contact a lot of great real estate sites and see if any of them would be willing to host them. In the author byline, just add a link back to your site. Generating great content can be tough, and popular real estate blogs often look for ways to get free content without spending much time putting it all together.
Of course, this makes effective link building hard to
do. How do you get high quality sites to provide a one-way,
non-reciprocal link to yours?
It ain't easy.
