Today’s blogpost is going to be looking at Backlinks. What are they and why should you care about them?  First let’s do some dictionary fun. A Back link is any link from an external website that links back to your website. A Backlink can also be called an Inbound Link.Backlinks can be thought of as referrals to your site.  This is a great way to think about them because just like referrals, backlinks have a certain quality to them. Backlinks from other real estate agents are going to be higher quality backlinks then say a website about birdwatching.  Also, backlinks from websites with high page ranks will also be stronger references in the eyes of Google.

There are two main reasons to have backlinks (and make them quality backlinks) the first is that Google likes to see them.  Anyone can spend time optimizing their own website and telling Google: “Look! I know what I’m talking about! I’m the Best!” But when other people (sites) are also saying it, that carries a lot more weight.  Just like with real world referrals, the more people talking about someone and saying positive things the more likely you are to give them a try.

The second reason is that the more paths that your potential audience can take to get to your website the better.  Yes, SEO is the primary goal but increasing over all web presence and spread of placements is a major secondary goal.  Think of these links as the online equivalent of traditional marketing (billboards, newspaper ads) except that they are free and won’t go away at the end of the month.

There are some great tools available online for managing your backlinks. The first for research purposes is http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php.  This site lets you insert keywords or industry and it will give you a list of the websites that are relevant and have locations to add link or submit a URL, exactly what you need when building a link campaign. The other tool that is very useful is http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php.  This tool lets you insert your URL and find all the backlinks to your site in Google, Yahoo and Bing.  It is a good idea on a weekly basis to check this to see how your backlinking campaign is going and if any new backlink that you did not submit yourself are appearing.  This last one is GREAT because it means that other people are posting your website for you, giving you converts and not just an audience (we’ll talk about converts vs. audience in a later post).

5 Things to do to increase Real Estate Backlinks:

• Signature: Put together a signature to use when commenting on blogs and forums. In this signature be sure to include your email and your website.  This gives people a way to get a hold of you and it increases backlinks to your site.
• Social Networks: set these up and whenever it asks for your personal website make sure to include your website.  Google has recently made some changes to its algorithm to take into consideration the rapidly updated social networks meaning they are going to get more importance than has been seen so far.
• Videos/Articles: when submitting articles/videos online to directories make sure to include your info in the “author” section of the article including your email, and you website.
• Link Requests: If you find website that you would like to have links from, partner websites, etc. just send them a quick email asking for a link, you’d be surprised how many people will do this
• Hire Real Estate SEO Pros