As you may already know (or may find out soon enough), we here at Realzi make some pretty lean, mean real estate websites.  They’re clean, functional, and are deliciously addictive to search engine spiders, who just can’t seem to get enough of thoroughly crawling, indexing, and ranking our sites.  Realzi sites are perfectly able to function as a standalone website.

However, there are more than a few benefits for having a Realzi install on a subdomain of your main site.  For one, you get to keep complete control over all elements of your main site.  That means if your broker affiliation changes, or you’d like to update your bio, or you want to completely redesign your site, you’re able to do that at your own leisure.  You’ll also be able to treat Realzi as the lead generation tool it is, treating it as one element of many services your site offers.

Finally, and most importantly, Google treats subdomains as more independent than directories on a website, which means links between a subdomain and your main site carry more value than links between a child page and a parent page in a directory structure.  Did I dip too far into techie jargon there?  What I mean is, links between, say, http://rets.realzi.com and http://www.realzi.com are weighted more than links between http://www.realzi.com and http://www.realzi.com/real-estate-websites.  So a Realzi install on a subdomain of your main site can be pretty valuable, provided you link the two up appropriately.

Take note of the last clause in the previous sentence: provided you link the two up appropriately.  This is absolutely key, entirely crucial, of devastating importance, and so on and so forth, especially if your main website happens to have been around for a while and is indexed by search engines.  Thankfully, this process is exceedingly easy.  All you need to do is put a link on the homepage of your main site pointing toward your Realzi install.  There’s more, much more, you could do to notify search engines of the existence of your Realzi install, but this is the absolute minimum and it’s probably the most valuable step you could take.

The link can be anywhere—in the header, in the footer, in the sidebar, in the body.  Just make sure that the link’s anchor text is a keyphrase you’d like to rank for, such as, say, “Austin condos.”  It’s as simple as that!

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.