I originally posted this at REW Blogs but I thought I would share it with the AR crowd as well as it got a lot of comments, hopefully those doing your own SEO will find it useful.

For those real estate webmasters that are trying to improve their natural search engine rankings, this link building blog post is a must read. Here I will cover many of the link building strategies that will help you increase your pagerank and link popularity, which as we all know will help improve your search engine rankings.

Authoring for authority websites:

This is one of the hardest yet most effective link building strategies there is. Basically the premise is to manage to get yourself on as an author for websites considered authorities in the real estate industry, or your local market. Examples would be http://www.nytimes.com/pages/realestate/index.html or your local chamber of commerce website, REW Online news etc. As an author, these authority websites will publish articles that you write, and often times (And the only ones we really care about for the purpose of link building) will allow you to have a signature linking to either your website, or your author bio (Which again to be valuable in the link building sphere must link directly to your website with a clean link)

There are other positives to this type of authoring, you show yourself as an authority in your market and by doing so, the readers of your articles may also link to you from their websites. Also, these articles may be picked up via syndication and that means (You guessed it) more one way backlinks.

Directory submissions:

This is an oldy but a goody, submitting to directories (Paid or free, but should be one way unless they are REALLY good) - By submitting to directories relevant to your website topics you gain valuable backlinks and pagerank. I made a note about not linking back to directories unless they are REALLY good, the reason for this is that there are so many directories out there (You can buy a script and put one up in a day) and most of them have little to no unique content, no traffic or search engine rankings and not worth giving away your valuable pagerank. However if a directory is high quality, meaning it has traffic, rankings, and provides a great backlink, it is sometimes acceptable to provide a reciprocal link. Just be choosy. Examples of good directories for real estate are:The Real Estate Webmasters Directory, Real Estate ABC and DMOZ Real Estate

Article Submissions:

Writing great articles and distributing them to the right article distribution portals and websites is an amazing way to build backlinks. Not only do you get backlinks from the article submission portals and websites such as www.ezinearticles.com you also get backlinks from the many websites that "hopefully" pick up your content for re-publication on their own websites.

Hopefully you say? That is correct - you see many webmasters are looking for great content to use to supplement their own content on their websites. IF YOU WRITE GREAT ARTICLES webmasters will go to these portals, find your content and publish it on their own site, with a juicy backlink to your website of course.

Press Releases:

What have you done that is newsworthy lately? Submitting a press release is not only a great way to drive traffic to your website and increase your exposure to both peers and prospects, it is a great way to build backlinks. If you choose a decent press release service such as www.prweb.com and you pay at least $80 (For PR Web that is) you will be able to place backlinks in your release.

Press release syndication: Not only do you receive backlinks from your actual press release website, these press releases are syndicated to many other websites backlinks and all. Thus you can end up with quite a lot of one way backlinks especially if your press release is of great interest. The more newsworthy the more websites will pick it up and publish it.

*Note - only submit press releases if you have actual news. New technologies, awards or high accolades received, business mergers are all examples of newsworthy topics for a release. I sold a house today / I am a great Realtor and other self promotional dribble is NOT newsworthy and will not be picked up by anyone and you are wasting your press release budget.

Note: I am the original author of this work and own all copyright and intellectual property rights to this content. If you would like to post any or all of this content on your own website, you MUST PROVIDE PROPER CREDIT including my full as the author: Morgan Carey, and a clickable link to the original located at http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/morgan-carey/409/show/