And while you’re at it, take a look at the slides from Alex Montalenti’s presentation:

| View | Upload your own

SEOMoz.org, one of the best resources for SEO professionals, weighted “Global Link Popularity of Site” as of Exceptional Importance in their Search Engine Ranking Factors.

To picture this, I quote Lucas Ng (aka shor)

“Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.”

2. Google Doesn’t Like Reciprocal Linking on Real Estate Websites

There was much hype about this in May, when the latest Google algorithm update included the removal of credit for reciprocal link accumulation on real estate websites.

One month later, SEOMoz discussed this in-depth and gave an Example from the Field of Real Estate.

They even put up a familiar scenario:

• A new realtor launches her site and finds that Google traffic is the best thing since sliced bread
• Naturally, wanting more, she starts reading online about how to get Google rankings to real estate websites
• Many of the popular forums & guides suggest forming relationships with other site owners in the real estate world and trading links
• Our realtor takes the hint – she works in Bend, Oregon, so she contacts site owners from Poughkeepsie to Puyallup seeking link exchanges
• Each site places a link to the other on a “links” page (a good example would be this one from a Missouri real estate agent)
• Our realtor gets a bit in rankings from the link love and she’s thrilled
• Matt* comes in and ruins her day :)

3. Google doesn’t like paid links

There has been a discussion on how to report paid links even earlier in April, and GoogleBot’s latest algorithm update this autumn permanently terminated this issue.

Bottom line

is: you can’t ask for links that are not natural and you can’t even pay for them. So, if you look at it, there are only 2 ways left for you network and get incoming links:

1. Blogging and
2. Social Network Communities (but we’ll talk about them in a sepparate post).

To get a clear picture on what type of links Google likes, you can watch this 6 minutes movie made by the guys at SEOMoz:

Or simply remember this GoogleBot quote:

“I really only want to count links that exist even if I didn’t”

Under no circumstances does this mean you can ignore your basic real estate SEO, like titles, URLs, meta tags, content, hierarchy, architecture and so on. But you’ll do this on-site SEO for your real estate website, just to get a decent fight with your competitors. If you want to get on top, you have to use whitehat SEO linking, and that’s networking with your blog.

And there are endless other incentives and reasons for you to consider blogging:

• If You’re Still Asking “What’s a Blog?”
• The 7 Reasons Why Your (Future) Clients Should Care That You Are a Real Estate Blogger
• 5 Reasons Why Brokers Should Require Agents to Write Blogs

* Matt Cutts works for the quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.

You can download the PDF presentation here.

Note the Blogging endorsement:

• Wordpress – Start your own blog today
• SixApart – Start blogging today
• LiveJournal – Platform for blogging discussion forum or a social network
• HousingWidgets – Place to find & share real estate tools for your site or blog
• TruliaMap – Showcase your listings on your website or blog with this widget
• ActiveRain – Free online community for real estate professionals to help promote & grow business

Via Future of Real Estate Marketing