To help determine where you show up in search results, Google looks at the number of incoming links to your website. Why? Well, think of it this way: If a lot of sites link to you, it shows Google that others consider your site relevant and informative, so Google will want to put you ahead of similar websites that don’t have as many incoming links and/or aren’t as optimized. While Realzi real estate websites are optimized to rank highly for long-tail keyphrases (505 Blackberry Ridge Aurora, Illinois 60506) — research shows most home buyers search this way — we encourage everyone to build links for faster, better results.

First things first: Know what a good link is. Stay away from “bad neighborhood” websites and spammy sites. When a link comes from a site that Google doesn’t trust, it doesn’t reflect well on you. Aim for links on popular, trusted sites. When you link to your site, don’t use “click here” as the linked text. This is a missed opportunity, and we see it happen all the time. Instead, use a relevant keyphrase to help Google know what your site is about. If you’re an Austin Realtor, you’d probably want to use “Austin Homes For Sale,” or “Austin Real Estate Search” as your linked text. So the link would look like this: Austin Homes For Sale.

On to the link building tips…

1. Just about every social networking site has a place for users to fill out a profile with a link to their homepage. We’ve already written about search-friendly links on LinkedIn, but popular sites like Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm also allow a link.

2. Link within your blog posts. For example, if you’re writing about one of your listings, link the address to its listing page. It’d look like this: “Don’t miss 6735 S Sundown Dr Indianapolis, IN 46254…” On a related note: Blog often. Shoot for at least one post per week. Need some inspiration? Check out our 7 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Real Estate Blog.

3. Do you read other real estate blogs? If you ever comment on a post, don’t forget to include a link to your site.

4. Write an article about real estate — anything from an overview of your city’s neighborhoods to a list of things to look for when buying a home — and submit it to article syndication sites like EzineArticles.com and A1articles.com. ActiveRain is another good place (and it’s all about real estate).

5. Write a solid press release and submit it to a PR syndicate. We love PRLeap because they let you include a few links in the body of the press release, which is a great opportunity to deep-link to more pages on your Realzi site. We’ve seen impressive results from this.

6. Use social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon to bookmark pages on your site. Don’t forget to use appropriate tags like the name of your city, the Zip code of the listing, etc.

Indexable IDX solutions are the latest in a long line of hot innovations for real estate websites.  Though they’ve been around for a while, their appeal is really starting to catch on, and they’re getting blogged about left and right these days.

Also known as spiderable IDX, an indexable IDX solution builds out pages on your site that correspond to listings in the MLS.  (Sounds kind of like Realzi, doesn’t it?)  The resulting benefit is that you have a massive, easily indexable and searchable site that Google can crawl repeatedly.  This translates to results for more keyphrases, which means more traffic.

Prior to the advent of indexable IDX, a typical approach to the display of MLS data involved a framed solution that was hosted elsewhere.  An organization would buy access rights to RETS data feeds, build out a frame displaying that data, and offer it to real estate agents to put up on their personal websites for a fee.  The frame usually featured a searchable list of properties taken from the relevant MLS.  A map search was often included as well.  Prospective buyers could retreive MLS data for residences that interested them, which left them more well-suited to the difficult task of home searching.

The good old days might seem just fine at first glance, but if you noticed, there’s a little sentence we slipped in there that drives home the relative uselessness of framed, non-indexable IDX solutions: “This sort of solution worked well for users who stumbled across such sites.”  The fact of the matter is, many of these old sites, despite displaying an easy-to-use, searchable, framed IDX solution, were buried in Google search results for short-tail keyphrases and were completely absent for many longer-tail keyphrases.  That’s because the MLS data—those reams of fresh, up-to-date, relevant data that Googlebot craves—is actually nowhere to be found on the site displaying the frame, so the resulting SEO benefit of displaying it is virtually nil.  This can’t be underestimated, either, because the attractiveness/ease of use/utility of your site is worthless if nobody can ever find it.  You could plan what would be the best party in the world, but if you don’t supply directions, you’ll end up eating cheese and crackers alone when the big day comes.  And that’s just not very fun.

Contrast this rather somber picture with the benefits of an indexable IDX.  Think about it: with the frequently updated, extremely relevant, keyword-rich data that an indexable IDX brings, you’ll have a fantastic competitive edge over other real estate websites.