How can we stay ahead of national sites like Realtor, Trulia and Zillow within organic search rankings?

So.. I think this is my first post in probably 5+ years of being a member of this great community that is solely intended to provide useful information/spark a conversation without any direct benefit to my network of real estate sites :) 

What I am hear to ask/discuss is how can an agent/agency website continue to stay above the likes of larger sites such Trulia, Zillow, Realtor, Yahoo Real Estate within an age when Google continues to place greater and greater emphasis on branded/high domain authority sites?

If you are not aware of this trend.. I encourage you to read Seomoz.org, seobook.com, and Distilled.com blogs to name a few of the larger ones talking about this.

How can one compete?

I believe it is through real/legit links from a variety of different IP address and domains of all shapes and sizes. 

I am not talking about directory and link exchanges... these don't necessarily hurt, but hard to say nowadays if they really help that much anymore.

Obviously domain strength carries significant weight, but based on my own experiments and observations... I sense pure volume of links from unique domains to a wide array of internal pages aka DON"T JUST GET LINKS TO YOUR INDEX PAGE :)  coupled with on-site optimization is still the key to success.

Yes..the larger sites have thousands of unique links, but they primarily point to the index page thus creating an in balanced link profile in Google's eyes plus these larger sites often have slower page load speeds and often poor onsite optimization for their internal pages as well!



Be it paid directory links, blog entries, social media, press releases or simply natural link acquisition I still find the best way  to grow and maintain this upper edge in Google.. specifically for long tail keywords but  also for more competitive keyword phrases  is through good old fashioned relationships/links trades with like minded individuals be it a simple blog roll link, yes these still work great if done correctly, or contextual linking from pages within each others sites.

I love SEO and hope this sparks a bit of a conversation.. if not.. oh well :)

All the best from Portland Maine,

John