A comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy involves building high quality backlinks to your real estate website. The reason for this is search engines place high value on votes of confidence to your website. A vote of confidence or high quality backlink is a combination of several factors including link populartiy, relevance and trust. Let’s explore how these factors come into play for rankings and how they are powerful contributors to backlinks.
Link Popularity
Link popularity is defined as a “measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web.” In other words if a site is naturally linked to by many then it is considered an authority on a particular subject. The more links from a broad range of sites to a specific site , the more popular that site becomes.
For example, If there are two equally informative real estate blogs in Silicon Valley that provides the same identical useful information about the same neighborhoods, then the site that has more links to it from other real estate related websites will have an opportunity to rank higher than its competitor with only 5 links (all other factors being equal). This concept is exactly similar to the offline world. If you have 100 agents referring business to you a year vs a competitor that only gets 5 referrals per year, you automatically are rewarded as being the expert as compared to your counterparts.
Relevance
As we are all consumers of internet information we can easily understand that the relevance of a site is important in determining a site’s authority on a particular subject. Relevance goes further when defined within the scope of backlinks. The more relevant a backlink is to your particular site or page, the more authoritative your site or page becomes in the eyes of search engines. Again this can be demonstrated by using an offline example. Suppose that Bob Broker is an expert on real estate in Contra Costa County. If Lucy Loan is an expert in funding loans in Contra Costa County and links to Bob’s site for real estate information, Lucy is providing a link that is highly relevant to Contra Costa Real estate. The backlinks do not necessarily have to be from within the same vicinity either. If Bob has a nationwide network of agents that link to Bob as an expert in Contra Costa Real Estate , again these links are considered relevant links.
Trust
The third factor that is considered in backlinks is the trustworthiness of a domain that is linking to your site. Authority is built on trust. Backlinks from authoritative and trusted sites related to your niche tells the search engines that your site is regarded as a valuable resource within your area of expertise.
Ranking Opportunity
The combination of these factors results in ranking opportunities for your site. The more links, the more relevant and the more trustworthy the incoming links, the better your chances are of getting ranked well.
Building backlinks takes time and ongoing effort and should be an integral part of a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy. But with this said, we have built site with zero backlinks and zero page rank that delivers up to 10 leads per day. There are a lot of factors including how much competition there is in a particular area, how much content is being produced compared to other sites and if the content is highly unique and relevant for the search terms.