Think INSIDE the Box for Linking

We're always hearing about thinking outside the box for innovative ideas and new business concepts.  And, many website designers and real estate professionals are very focused on links coming into their sites from other sources for SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

Incoming links are quite important for SEO, however, links within your site, Internal Links, are very important as well.  

What Are Internal Links

An internal link is one you place on your site that takes the site visitor to another page of your website.  It's passing them along internally.  Who would know better than you what a page is about, the information you've placed there and its value to your site visitor?  Internal links are important for more than one reason:

• They help your visitor to find the information they want.
• They help the search engines to crawl your site efficiently and relate pages by information.
• They pass link value from one page to another, meaning linking from your home page to another page on your site passes some value of the links into the home page on to the page you've linked to internally.
• They improve the overall usability of the site.

An Internal Linking Strategy

Page Analysis - Whether you're starting a new website or working with one you already have, you should develop an internal linking strategy.  The purpose of this strategy is to determine the focus of different pages and the value of each to the site visitor.  For each of these pages, look through your current content, especially from the Home Page, and see where a mention of this page would be relevant and help a site visitor to move through the site to the information they seek.

 

     Example:  You have an internal page focused on the local property inspectors and their contact information.  You have another page that discusses how inspections work and another that mentions inspections as related to repair negotiations.  You could place a link in each of those pages taking the site visitor to the page about inspectors.

 

Anchor Text - Anchor text is the text of the link.  Using our previous example, we might use this text to link to the inspectors page:  "Our area home inspectors' information."  You definitely want the link text to be relevant to the page where it's taking the visitor, even incorporating keywords used in the title and content of the target page.

 

Sticky Sites - A "sticky" website is one which holds onto its visitors.  They don't come to one or a couple of pages and bounce away.  When you provide relevant and helpful internal links to direct your visitors to the information they desire, or information they didn't know they wanted but do when they see the link, you're improving your site for not only visitors but search engines.

 

     RealtySoft Makes It Easy

In fact, a great deal of internal linking is done for you when you first set up your site and tell RealtySoft which neighborhoods you serve in your MLS.  

 

 

In the image we see just a couple of places where the RealtySoft system inserts your neighborhood name links to information and search pages about each neighborhood.  Of course, you can also edit the link anchor text and page titles easily as well.

 

Take a look at your real estate website, especially your most important and frequently visited pages, and do some internal linking to make your site more valuable to visitors and get a little search engine clout as well.

About Jim Kimmons: Jim Kimmons, with more than 16 years experience as a licensed real estate agent and broker in 3 states, is a consultant to Realtors in how to use technology to market and manage their businesses. He has also written books and eBooks on Internet marketing and real estate. Jim is RealtySoft's chief evangelist and is a compensated regular contributor to the RealtySoft.com blog.

 

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