Do you want your site to be on the elusive Page One of Google(r) when someone searches for a Realtor in your area?  There are many ways to achieve good search engine rankings, but, by far, without a doubt, the best way to get your site to be number one is through LINKING KEYWORD-RICK ANCHOR TEXT to your site's main page.

Here is an example of keyword rich anchor text:

For example, we would link Queen Creek Real Estate to ShawnStagg.com, as I just did.  Shawn Stagg sells real estate in Queen Creek.  If Shawn has a thousand links coming in, from all around the world wide web, and they all link to Shawn's site using phrases like Queen Creek Realtor, Shawn will soon be the king of Queen Creek Real Estate.    

If you think you already know all there is to know about linking, you might want to read ahead anyway, because today, we are going to learn about (drumroll please):  The A to B to C Linking Model

Okay, hopefully everyone understands how important it is to have "inbound links" (links from other websites), so as to increase your page rank.  However, what many Realtors and Mortgage Brokers do not understand is that "reciprocal links" do very little for your search engine results.

A reciprocal link is when you ask someone to link to you and, in turn, you will link to them.  How nice!  We just effectively cancelled each other's link out!  Yea! 

This is why you should always have an A-B-C model when it comes to linking.

You see... if the Googlebot crawls your site and finds a link to another Realtor in another state, the Googlebot than "crawls" that other Realtor's site and than finds that you did an "exchange."  Big whoop.  You think the smartest search engine on the web doesn't see what's going on here?

What Google is really impressed by is one-way links.  This is when someone links to you simply because you are brilliant.  Like when we link to an article in CNN for example.  We don't email CNN and ask them to link to us, you know, just to be cool about the whole thing.  We just link to CNN and CNN has an unbelievably powerful web presence because of those links.

So you want to be like CNN.  You want a bunch of Realtors linking to your real estate site, but you really don't want to link to them...ideally.  Think about that.  You don't want to "reciprocate".  Reciprocating is bad. 

So how can we do this?

This can be achieved 3 ways (that I can think of right now):

1.  You can be a bad person and exchange links, but take their link down after a while.  Now they have linked to you, but- ha ha- you have taken down their link in hopes that they don't check back!  Hopefully everyone checks on all of their reciprocal links all of the time, because people do this dirty trick all of the time.  There is software that you can use to maintain links.

2.  You can be bad and sneaky too; you can use the "no follow" tag.  The link goes a little somethin' like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Arizona Mortgages and Real Estate</a>

The "no follow" tag tells the search engine not to consider that link.  That means that you are linking to them, but they are basically, not linking to you, even though it looks like they have- blue words and you can click them and everything.  So they get a one way link and you get squat! 

Oh my goodness!  How many of your link exchange partners are doing that to you right this instant?!?  You had better check, because I guarantee you'll find a few.  (You'll have to browse to your links and then do a "View : Source" in your web browser.  Then use the "find" function to look for "no follow" tags in the code.  They can blanket the whole site by putting the code at the very top or they can do it to individual links.)

3.  The best way.  The ethical way.  The Karen George way.  The A to B to C way:  You link to my site and I link to your site from another place.  We each get a one way link!  Pretty simple huh? 

For example:  If anyone would like to link to http://www.azwm.com, using the words "Arizona Home Loans" as the text anchor, I would link to your site- not reciprocally, not from azwm.com- but from another site altogether. 

I could link to you from here, as one example.  So you link to AZWM and now you have a one way link from my blog (and blogs are a great place to have a one way link from by the way). 

Or perhaps you would like to link the words "Arizona Home Loans" to my profile here.  Then, I could link back to you from AZWM - get it? 

The A-B-C model is the best way to go when it comes to linking.  You want lots of one-way links if you want to see real search engine success.  You wouldn't believe how your site will jump through the rankings when you have 500 one-way, inbound links to your site, rather than a few, limp "link trades."  Heck, who is that supposed to impress?

Good luck and happy linking.