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Introduction to link building
The number and the quality of inbound links is the single most important factor in determining whether your estate agent website will appear in the top ten positions in Google’s natural search rankings. There are other factors (see Estate agent SEO - an introduction) but this is by far the most important, particularly in competitive markets like real estate.
Our link building discussions focus on Google rather than search engines in general because it has such a large share of the UK market and Google’s algorithms weight links even more highly than Yahoo!, MSN or the other search engines.
The web as a social network
To think of a link as text on one website that links to another website is to mis-understand its true value. To successfully harness the true value of the web for your property business, it is useful to think of the web as a huge social network and think of links as relationships rather than just “links”.
According to Google's head of Webspam,
Matt Cutts, Google only wants to count genuine editorial citations when assessing the value of links. If you think of the web as a large social network where website owners, editors, bloggers and the general public recommend, bad-mouth and share information about websites then you will be well on your way to thinking like Matt Cutts. His job is to devalue, de-prioritise and discount the value of certain types of link. And guess what? He’s getting better at his job!
Types of links
As so many people try to cheat or spam search engines by creating “unnatural” links to sites to try and increase their rankings, all search engines try to determine the intent of links. If they could rank sites purely on “love” they would deliver the best possible search results.
Search expert
Dan Thies classifies links into five broad categories that reflect differing intentions. Search engines, particularly Google, are getting better at detecting which links are which.
- Editorial links – natural links that are given because someone actually likes, recommends or even hates a site.
- Bought links – links which are purchased either as part of advertising or bought solely to influence search engines. It can difficult for search engines to detect these but they are getting better at it. See Guide to buying links.
- Bartered links – links which the website owner does not necessarily endorse but allows because they gain something in return for example content or a return link. Note that search engines can detect reciprocal links and they discount the value of them.
- Manufactured links - these are links that have been automatically created with the express purpose of influencing search engine results. Whole websites are often created full of interdependent links, as is the case with Link Farms. More recently a new class of site has emerged that scrapes content from the web, re-formats it, adds links and structures itself to look “natural”. These can be difficult for search engines to detect.
- Stolen links – these are one-way links that are placed on a site without the website owner’s endorsement or permission. One example would be adding posts to comments and blogs with a link back to your own site. In addition, automatic programs exist which access insecure sites and place links on them.
The concept of TrustRank and seed sites
Clearly, some links are worth considerably more than others. There are many ways search engines can determine the value or otherwise of a link but probably the most important is the “authority” of the site providing the link.
You have probably heard of PageRank which ranks your site on a one to ten scale depending on how many sites link to you and how many sites link to the sites that link to you. It is one measure of how powerful a site is but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
TrustRank is the name for an algorithm that Google uses to bias search results towards sites that it knows are human reviewed. There are billions of websites in the world and Google uses these human-reviewed seed sites as a starting point. Examples include directories like Yahoo!, Wikipedia, government & education sites and big news brands like the BBC.
Links from these sites and from sites that have links from these sites are much more valuable than their PageRank alone would suggest. The implication of this is that getting quality links is often more important than quantity.
Implications for real estate agents and developers
It sounds obvious but one of the biggest implications of Google’s emphasis on one-way links and editorial citations is that in the long term, in order to compete effectively on natural search, you need a website that people want to link to.
The best way to do this is to become an authority on a particular niche, for example, ski property in the Alps. For most estate agents, this will mean becoming an authority in the town or area you operate in and doing it better than your competitors.
So what does becoming an authority entail?
- Defining what you want to be an authority on. See also Developing your keyword strategy.
- Investing in producing good content for your niche. For example, innovative mapping, buying guides, good local content. Foxtons is very good example of a site that does this well and it ranks Number One for “London estate agent”, which is a very competitive term.
- Investing in the creative, the “look and feel” and the usability for your website. Real estate is very competitive and the look of your website is one of the things that can set you apart. See also Principles of good web design.
- Being newsworthy. PR is more important than ever. If you can write content and press releases that will get you covered by relevant sites, you are onto a winner.
- Building relationships. The best links often come about from personal relationships. Identifying the important “hubs” or “authorities” in your niche and building relationships with them will help tremendously. You may have to pay to get the best links but it won’t cost you the earth. You could sponsor local community sites, for example.
- Being creative. If you can come up with good ideas and PR angles people will link to you more than they will your competitors.
Becoming an authority on a particular niche is of course a long game. It cannot be done overnight but if you do it well, the competitive advantages in the medium to long term are huge
In the short term, there are still things that you can do to make a big difference to your natural search rankings. Spending more time building one-way links from “quality” directories and buying advertising text links on sites that rank well for the terms you want to compete on can both be done relatively quickly and cost effectively.
This is not to say that you should not undertake reciprocal link building activity, but it is important to understand its limitations. If you have the opportunity to swap links with a relevant and well-ranked website on equal or favourable terms then it is probably worth doing as long as your understand the opportunity cost of the other things you could be doing with your time and resources.