Using Other Social Networks to Increase SEO to Your Website

December 26, 2007
By: Peter Quinlan
Author's Website: http://www.zillow.com

As many agents know, one of the best ways to promote your blog, website or agent profile page is to obtain inbound links. For those of you new to link building, it can be a daunting and painful task! Lucky for you, I took some notes while building my own links. Below, I have provided a number of sites that allow you to place a high quality link from within your profile page. I have also displayed some of the more popular social sites that offer links, but use the no follow tag. While you do have to sign-up for all of these sites and it may not be easy to find, rest assured the links are there and they are free.

Most of these sites live in the real estate world, but as you notice I mention a few of the more popular social sites.

Profiles that allow links and do follow. (Followed links are reviewed by search engine crawlers and the link is taken into consideration when ranking your website)

Linkedin.com

Realestatewebmasters.com

ActiveRain.com

Zillow.com (my employer)

Propertyqube.com

Realtown.com

Homehugg.com

Squidoo.com

Profiles that offer no follow. (No follow links are links but are not crawled by search engine bots and not counted towards your sites ranking)

Myspace.com

Facebook.com

Yahoo answers

Stumbleupon.com

Reddit.com

Del.icio.us

Trulia.com

Placing your links on sites that do not offer followed links is still a good idea, just don’t expect credit for the link. These sites are better as a means of actual traffic.

Simply having a website is not enough. It’s important to use social networking sites in order to increase your findability and leverage some high quality links back to your website.

This list is by no means complete, so feel free to mention other sources of free followed links.

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Categories: Identity Management, SEO, Websites

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Dee Copeland

Squidoo is often recognized as a great resource for online networking, but I still haven't gotten involved in it. I'm not sure why I haven't made the leap. Do you Squidoo?

Peter Quinlan

I have not used Squidoo, in fact it's the only site on the list that I did not actually use. It seemed to take more time than the others. One of these days I will create a lens!

Wesley LeFebvre

Keep in mind, just because the link may have a nofollow attribute, which means that link won't be used to increase the landing pages page rank, that doesn't necessarily mean you don't get credit for the anchor text. So thank you for including both groups!

Peter Quinlan

In theory the nofollow attribute is not supposed to count the anchor text, but there is a debate whether it actually works properly or not.

Poppy Dinsey

Great article Peter, I've been a bit slow to do anything with this information but I'm signing up to lots of these lovely sites today! A positive way to start the New Year!

Halfdeck

"In theory the nofollow attribute is not supposed to count the anchor text, but there is a debate whether it actually works properly or not."

A year ago, I ran a test where nofollow anchor text actually did increase relevance score of a URL. Since then, Matt Cutts claimed (somewhere on DaveN's blog) that nofollow no longer pass anchor text, but I've been hearing a few SEOs say anchor text is still passing.