Real Estate Links - What's a good number?

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.