How to Correctly Add Links to your Real Estate Blog Posts
One of the things I decided to add to my list of things to accomplish this year was to help as many real estate agents as possible to blog properly in every way possible.
It’s one thing to say that you are blogging on a regular basis and providing quality, (dare I say it…) hyper-local content, but it’s another to say that you are doing it correctly so that your goals of reaching the masses are met.
By now it’s hopefully not new news that blogs can get you ranked on google and other search engines (but who really uses the other ones anyway?) ten times faster than your conventional website can. By strategically using techniques that we have covered in previous posts (such as keyword research, strategic real estate blogging video webinar, and above the fold) you can also achieve excellent google ranking too.
One of the keys to gaining higher rankings is by getting more airtime. By this I mean keeping your readers on your blogsite for longer than a few seconds. Yes, we’re talking seconds here people, but what we want to achieve is as many minutes as possible!
The above image shows how my V.A.Work website has been used over the course of the past month – with the number of visits, page views, number of pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and percentage of new visits. All of these statistics are REALLY valid to keep track of, however, for the sake of this post, the average time and site and the number of pages per visit is what we are focusing on.
Now here’s the million dollar question. Did you click on that link? And if you did, what happened? If you didn’t here it is again: V.A.Work. Go ahead and click it.
What happened was you were taken from this site to another site altogether. But how? Via a NEW SCREEN! This is the ultimate takeaway from this post.
When you want to share another website within your blog post, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT add the link to that site without having it open in a NEW WINDOW. Why? Because if you add the link without having it open in a new window, you’ve just lost your reader to the other site YOU sent them off to and cut your airtime short on your own site!
Here’s how this is accomplished:
Let’s say you want to give a list of the schools that are within your market area for potential buyers to go and checkout. So we add the list of schools like so:
- A School
- B School
- C School
When you highlight the first “A School” text, you will then click on the link button and see the following screen pop up:
After you enter the link to the “A School”, you will then click on the Target drop down box and choose Open In New Window:
You’ll now have a link added to your site, providing your reader with additional information, but not taking them completely away from your own site that you have worked SO hard to get them to in the first place!
Remember, the more airtime you get and the more pages your visitors go to equals better ranking and more traffic for you.
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Great tip, Suzanne! With more and more competition for eyeballs, you definitely don’t want to lose your readers to outbound links — BUT — you also don’t want to be link stingy, because links are what the web is built around.
Great post Chris!
I always wondered about the opening a new window. Now I know alway get them to open a new window so to close out they have to pass by my page again.
Does opening a new window shut off the timer on your page or is it still running while they are looking at the linked page?
Great tip, Suzanne! I see so many people that drive traffic away from their own site from not having links open in a new window.
-Bob- I believe the clock keeps running, till they close the window/tab your site was on.
This is a good tip.
When I link to one of my own blog posts, then I open the new page in the same window. I learned that at some point when I was at blogging college…
Thank you Chris, I have been doing it like you said for a while now but only after hearing it from someone else. It’s a good reminder for all of us to know these things.
I have hired Suzanne to create a custom fan page and a WordPress blog. I have been wanting to do this for over 6 months. If I had not hired Suzanne I would still be saying “I have to do this”. It is being done and I am just waiting do see it, while I am out selling houses. We all have our specialties.
Thanks Chris and Suzanne!
Thank you for that very valuable post. It is these little things that can really make a profound impact.
I would rank this up there with uploading pictures correctly by adding in title, alt text, caption, etc. When you care enough to do the little things great it makes everything else greater.
Thanks, Chris! As always, you’re a wealth of very useful information! Anyone who doesn’t follow you…well, I just hope they’re all from Northern NJ.
Wonderful! I’ve been doing this since I started blogging! I love to learn I’m doing something right! Thanks for the great info, Suzanne!
Great tip Suzanne. I go a slightly different angle and open the link in a new tab, rather than a new window. Browsers (people) tend to not like windows popping up, and most people use tabbed browsing.
If you set to open in a new tab it is less dramatic, and your page remains right next door and visible.
Just a thought!
This one is a no brainer really!
Great! For once I was doing something correctly the first time — but only because not opening a new page cut off the link page within my site. Didn’t realize I was doing myself a bigger favor. The more you know …
Interesting tip.
I wish this was the default setting. It’s annoying to have to change it for each link, but totally worth it.
-Jerry
@ZoomJer
Thanks for the help Chris. I have often wondered the benefits of using the (blank) target and now I know why it’s beneficial…Keep the good stuff coming!
Suzanne,
Glad I stumbled on your blog. I’m also an agent here in Reno. And have been blogging the past 3 years. Thanks for the tips and resources.
Great Help for us agents who doesn’t have the time to “keep up”.
-Joe
Any way you can do this on Blogger?
Probably not one of the caveats to free!
Good tip…I cringe when I see people who have worked so hard at getting people to their site just give up that traffic by sending them to another site. I know I have been guilty of this myself a more than once. Thanks for the reminder.
Great tip, I need to go back and see what I have been doing. ouch…I hope I have been doing it all the time.
Thanks!
I STRONGLY DISAGREE! .. and here’s why – the focus is all wrong.
As a web designer focused on user experiences, this is a bad experience for your website, but there is something bigger going on. Let me explain.
The problem with forcing a link to open in a new window is that it is an unexpected action. Users don’t expect, and therefore don’t want, a window to open like that. In addition to being unexpected, it is assuming that your users don’t know how to use the internet. The back button is a very common feature that everyone is familiar with. By opening the link in a new window, you actually take the back button away from them, limiting their ability to interact with their site in a normal way. Very bad user experience and a big negative for your site.
So here’s where the focus is all wrong (and unfortunately I’ve seen this quite a lot in the real estate industry. The focus of this article is on driving traffic to your website and then forcing users to stay there. Instead, we should focus on writing compelling content that is really, genuinely, authentically helpful the the people that visit our sites.
It’s often been said that it’s much easier (and cheaper) to keep a customer than to gain a new one. The same thing goes for the people on our websites. Doing something to force them to stay on your site may work once, but they are much less likely to return.
I hope this isn’t too harsh. I just wanted to offer a different perspective from a user experience professional’s stand point.
Lastly, from a consumer’s stand point, I have searched for homes, and consistently found real estate websites through google – because they did a lot right to rank their page high. However, they didn’t actually offer me anything as a potential home buyer, so I left very quickly.
In conclusion, focus on your users and not your website. If you do this, your website will be MUCH more successful – even if it’s harder to track immediately through analytics.
For further reading:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/01/should-links-open-in-new-windows/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html
Valid points Josh.
However don’t most users have their new windows set to open as new tabs?
This is a great tip that I did know, but it’s good reinforcement and I totally support that it’s very important to keep your readers on your site or at least have an easy way back. Thanks again for another great post!
Chris. Not really. There are a variety of ways users can click on links to open them in new tabs, but not by default. That would mean you would have a different window open for every single link you ever click on. haha. (In the first link I posted earlier, it has some ways to open links in new windows if you scroll down – right click on the link it the most common)
The main point though, is that this decision falls into the users hands, and that we don’t force them to do things. That makes for bad user experiences, which of course hurts your sites personal reputation. Unfortunately there is no analytics for that. They just don’t come back.
This post is a few months old but maybe Josh and Chris- you will see this. What about tabbed browsing? Do many use open in a new Tab? I do and then I find myself returning to the original many times. Chris- i just did that with your article called” Aggregate, Filter, Rinse, Repeat”. I spawned several new tabs based on that- read; click; return. And sometimes I then clicked from a spawned window……
Its is a very good blog for link building, it will help a huge number of people. Link exchange with high PR sites related your niche market is one of the great tool for site ranking!