BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

If you haven’t heard about it yet, check out RealBlogging.com

According to an article today at RisMedia, it was acknowledged that blogging has become mainstream, and

“To meet this growing need in the real estate industry, RealBlogging – the self proclaimed Official Real Estate Industry Blog – was launched this week. Validating that claim is their line up of bloggers that reads like an industry who’s who of Authors, Speakers and Real Estate Experts. Collectively RealBlogging may have pooled together the most extensive real estate brain trust the industry has ever seen. With interaction and blogging in large part being based on the sharing of knowledge, this level of cooperation is unheard of and to be applauded.”

And, if you look at the list of contributors, I think you’ll be impressed.  The contributors plan to address a wide range of real estate issues including marketing, profitability, agency, the Internet and real estate lead generation, among others.

Here’s hoping the site lives up to its promise.   It is great to see a number of real estate industry leaders coming together to share thoughts and ideas.

Let us know if you think this new blog will be useful to you in your business!

Update 6-13-06:  For additional information, see this post about taking a fresh look at real estate link strategies.

I’ve been asked several questions recently about how to structure links - both on your own real estate website, and what you want to have appearing on other websites.

So, here’s some basic information about links:

• First, you need to know the term “Anchor Text”.  Anchor text refers to the words that are used for the live link to a website, real estate or otherwise.  And, the search engines use the Anchor Text to help them figure out what your website is about.
• The anchor text and description you use to link to your website should be changed periodically so that you don’t end up with a lot of links coming to your website that all say the same thing.  It looks unnatural to the search engines.
• Don’t just link to your home page.  Set up pages that target different keywords, and obtain links to those internal pages, using the appropriate anchor text and description.  Linking to internal pages will increase your chances of ranking for a variety of search terms, and encourage the search engines to crawl more pages of your website.

Search engines also pay attention to the description that is close to the Anchor Text.  So, you should include your keywords in the description of your site.  And, wherever it’s possible to bury the Anchor Text in a paragraph, take advantage of it.  Here are some examples of different types of links:

Real Estate Websites
Learn how to create a lead-generating real estate website.  We provide services to drive traffic to your website and generate leads.

**************

Learn how to create a lead-generating real estate website.  We provide services to drive traffic to your website and generate leads.

**************

When you are providing information to other webmasters, it’s a good idea to include both forms of the link information, like this:

URL:  http://www.buildrealestatewebsites.com
Title:  Real Estate Website
Description: Learn how to create a lead-generating real estate website.  We provide services to drive traffic to your website and generate leads.

• The text above tells another webmaster that you want the Title linked to the URL, followed by the Description.  Here’s the HTML version.  If a webmaster is entering HTML, it should be possible to use the approach where the anchor text is in the middle of the description.

You should use the full URL for your website.  That means including http://www.  followed by your domain name.

If you’re planning on setting up link exchange pages, keep in mind that a long list of anchor text links won’t attract many link partners.  Using a format that allows for keyword-rich links, you’ll be helping your link partners, and yourself.