More To Look Out For When Exchanging Links
In an earlier post I outlined how to tell if an offer to exchange links was worthwhile. Lately there has been some talk that exchanging Reciprocal Links no longer works. The fact is that link exchanges still work although I believe some carry more weight than others. It has been widely noted in SEO forums (and I agree) that a link from a site whose links are organized as a "web directory" IS ignored.
By "web directory" I mean where they have multiple categories not related to the actual theme of the site - so if a real estate site has a links directory that has categories for travel sites and health insurance sites etc. - you probably get no benefit from the exchange.
Also, if a site uses popular links programs like Linksmanager you most likely get zero benefit from from the link as Google would recognize such programs and ignore links from them.
It IS getting harder and harder to find link exchanges that are of value but there still are some out there.
posted by Doug Towes @ Saturday, January 21, 2006
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2 Comments:
Yes Doug I have to agree that there is probably a far lower value to these reciprocal links. One of the problems I have seen lately though is that it is hard to get indexed in the first place if your page is not discoved by a search engine or two. If you can post your link to a site that is being indexed by Google on a regular basis (has a high pagerank) then you will be able to get into the indexes in the first place.
Bill Nadraszky
Realtor marketing weblog
Doug and Bill, I do agree with you. Here is an article i wrote concerning links and getting index that I believe could be of some value:
During my time as a real estate agent in three different States, I noticed something. There is never a lack of people, magazines, publications or websites that are willing to “help” you market yourself to the public at large. Most of their help comes with a lot of dollar signs, but they can help.
Really, how much could you spend buying signs, placing your one or two listings in a real estate publication and joining networking groups? And what about having a website built? Forget about it. The costs add up to be so high that who can afford the marketing.
One agent told me that being in business her first two years cost her $70,000. So how can you market your real estate business without it costing you a fortune? I mean, didn’t you get into this business to make money?
Publish your own magazine!
I met a man in Las Vegas who was a real estate agent. He was from the north, so I will spare you some of his explicatives, but he mentioned to me how tired he was of the fees the magazines charged just for one page. He said that it was great that every grocery store had them, but was it really $1,000 per page?
He decided to create his own publication and put it out monthly instead of paying the prices for the other free publications that were out there. That one little page in the other magazines brought him some calls, but what if he had more space?
The idea worked like a charm. He decided to print a newspaper like publication. It cost him about $1,500 to print about 2,000 copies which he distributed himself. He put all of his listings in the magazine, and sold spots to other disgruntled agents. The advertising space he sold for about $100 per page paid for the printing in full and he had 2,000 newspapers to distribute to the grocery stores, many of whom were happy to let him post there.
The calls kept coming. He was getting tons of listing business. It seems that people loved the idea of larger pictures for listing their homes and they were excited to give him the business.
He increased his printing amounts month after month, until he had more business than he could handle. His daughter and son, also in the real estate business were getting the benefit of the overflow and today, I imagine that their family has a steady stream of warm leads calling because of their own publication. Fantastic idea!
Build up your own web links!
If you have a website, then you no doubt have tried to find it on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. You do searches with keywords like, “real estate in Las Vegas” only to find out that you are nowhere near the front page in the results. Then you read that statistically the top three pages are the ONLY ones visited by surfers on a search engine. So, what can you do to help build your site’s ranking and start getting visitors and leads from the Internet?
Search Engine Optimizing is beyond the scope of this article, but you can start building a web presence by finding sites that are willing to link to you. By them creating a link to your site, you can build your website ranking very quickly. Not so much because of the people who will follow that link to your site, but because of the search engine spiders which will follow that link to your site.
Those spiders, are computer programs that are looking for new information on the web all of the time. A link from a site will direct those spiders to look at your site. Then, once there, the spider can analyze your site to see what you are all about.
The more links that point to your site, the better because it is like having ten friends say, “You have to see King Kong”. Spiders go to hundreds of websites daily and if several of them say, “you have to see Bob’s real estate website,” then they will go see it.
How do you find link partners and directories where you can list that won’t cost you a fortune? Start with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. They are the places you want to be listed anyway. Search for things like “link partners” or “real estate directories”, and then visit those sites to see what it takes to get a link on there.
Only list on the ones that are free and offer a link to your website. Putting your phone number on a site helps none. But having the link is everything.
Bill Nixon runs a FREE real estate directory at http://www.checkmyagent.com
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