Article Submission for Real Estate SEO - How to Do It Right

Summary: In this real estate SEO tutorial, you'll learn how to increase your website's link popularity by submitting your articles to a select group of websites.

Here's an overview of the rarely used (but highly effective) real estate SEO technique. First, you will use a search engine like Google to find high-ranking websites related to real estate, mortgages, or perhaps your city or town ... any topic you can write about.

Then you will submit an article to the website in exchange for their keeping the author's byline and hyperlink to your website.

This is different from some of the more passive article publishing techniques you may have read about. Instead of letting website owners / publishers find your articles through a site like EzineArticles.com, you will actively seek them out. The keys to this real estate SEO technique are to (A) write a great article to increase the chances of publication, and (B) find relevant websites that accept such articles.

We already talked about article writing in a previous tutorial. So let me focus on item 'B' from above — finding relevant websites who will publish your article(s).

Overview of Article Submission Process

Here's a surprisingly simple process for finding article opportunities that not many people know about. I cannot begin to tell you how many high-quality inbound links I've acquired by using this process.

1. Get out a piece of paper or open a Word document. You're going to create a list. Label the document as "Article Publishing Opportunities."
2. Now make a short list of the topics your article covers. For example, if I wanted to publish an article about SEO, my topic list might include the following: Internet marketing, websites, online marketing, search engine optimization, small business marketing, webmasters, etc.
3. Now you will look for websites that publish articles related to the topics you have just listed.
4. Take the first topic on your list. Put that word or phrase into Google, and follow it with the phrase "+submit article" (drop the quotes, but keep the plus sign). For example, my entire search query might be "internet marketing +submit article" (without quotes).

Basically, I am telling Google to show me all web pages / websites that contain my key phrase plus the words "submit article." Many of the websites turned up by such a search will be the kinds of sites that accept articles like the one I've written.

Now it's just a matter of contacting the owner of the website, or following whatever article-submission process they have outlined on their site.

I once spent an afternoon doing this for my real estate marketing website. I made a list of sites that published articles related to marketing, real estate marketing, small business, etc., and then I submitted articles to each of them. Within a week I had acquired new links from more than two-dozen established websites. And you can do the same.

If I were a real estate agent here in Austin, Texas, and I had articles on real estate and mortgages, I would conduct the following searches to identify publishing opportunities:

• Austin +submit article
• Austin Texas +submit article
• Real estate +submit article
• Austin homes +submit article
• Mortgage +submit article
• Home loans +submit article
• You get the idea...

Ask for the Link

Look at some of the other articles on the websites you come across, and see if they include links to the author's website with their articles. If they don't, politely ask them to do so with your article. It's a fair exchange — quality content in exchange for a link to the author's website.

Occasionally you'll find publishing opportunities that provide great exposure, even if they don't link to your site. For example, maybe your local newspaper wants to publish your article on the real estate section of their website. That's a great PR opportunity in general, but it still doesn't hurt to ask for that link!

SEO Tutorials >> Submitting Articles