Trading Real Estate Links - Waste of Time at Best

Article Summary: You need links to your website in order to rank well in the major search engines. This much is true. But trading real estate links with networks of other webmasters is not the best way to go about it. In fact, it can be a dangerous SEO tactic that does more harm than good.

About once a week, I do some keyword research to see what kinds of Internet marketing topics real estate professionals are researching online. When I entered "real estate link" as a starting phrase, my keyword tool came up with a lot of search queries related to trading real estate links (presumably for SEO purposes).

So it seems a lot of real estate agents are still interested in link exchanges as a way to boost search engine visibility. But trading real estate links is a waste of time at best, and could be downright harmful to your rankings.

[By the way, if you’re not sure why anyone would trade real estate links in the first place, your might want to start with this article on real estate link building for SEO purposes.]

So I have published this article and intentionally optimized it for the phrase trading real estate links so that agents researching the subject will find this article ... and hopefully heed my warning.

Here's the bottom line. Trading real estate links is not an effective way to boost your search engine ranking. It may work in the short term, but there's a good chance your website will be penalized for "artificially" inflating your rankings through link swaps. If you've had your ear to the ground in recent months, you'll know that thousands of real estate websites suffered severe Google penalties for this very thing. [more]

So what's a real estate webmaster to do? How do you go about link building in such a way that produces good results while avoiding Google penalties at the same time?

3 Alternatives to Trading Real Estate Links

1. Create high-value web content -- A better alternative to trading real estate links is to obtain links without the need for trading. You can do this by creating website content that is valuable, unique and useful. Why do you think I spend so much time blogging and create free e-books and articles? People link to these things!
2. Publish articles online -- I've been using this technique for nearly five years now, and I certainly wouldn't spend that much time on it if it didn’t produce results. By publishing articles online (and on a regular basis), you can steadily increase the number of websites that link to your real estate website -- thus improving your search engine visibility.
3. Hire us for our SEO services -- One way we provide value to our real estate SEO clients is by leveraging our network of real estate websites and small-business websites. I use these sites to increase the link popularity of my clients' websites, which in turn helps to boost their search engine ranking. And they don't have to waste their time trading real estate links to achieve results. Learn more here