If you want your real estate investing company’s website or blog to be found and bring in leads you have to get serious about improving your placement in search engine results. If you have done any reading up and research on SEO so far you have probably heard a lot about links. Yes, it can be ridiculously confusing but before you go off and spend the next two weeks building links that will actually kick you down the ranks or gamble on another SEO ‘expert’ take a look at our quick guide.

Back Links

Backlinks or incoming links to your real estate investing website probably create the most buzz, are the most sought after and yet can do a lot of damage, not to mention wasting a lot of your time and resources.

Links to your site will only help boost your rank if they are from quality sites. So all that junk link exchanging and creating a myriad of mirror interlinking sites is usually a waste of time. Also note that while there is often a lot of talk about blog and forum commenting to create backlinks these are now longer anywhere near as powerful as other types of genuine links.

What’s good? High quality, related link exchanges, article marketing and guest blogging.

Outbound Links

Some advice columns out there will tell you you also need to be creating external links from your content on your real estate investing web assets to other related domains for improved search engine rankings. This can help to some extent but again, lots of outbound links to poor quality sites can kill you. Authority sites only and definitely no one who competes with your real estate investing business in anyway.

Internal Links

Perhaps the most commonly overlooked type of links by new real estate investing companies are internal links. These are the links between your own pages. Use keyword specific and focused pages with keyword links between them to improve your rankings.

From: http://www.fortunebuilders.com

While year-over-year home price measurements notched down in 2011, prices are expected to see a slight uptick in 2012, according to Clear Capital.

Should the valuation company’s predictions ring true, it would be the first time since 2006 that the change in annual home prices has landed in positive territory.

Data released by Clear Capital Monday shows year-over-year, national home prices were down 2.1 percent in 2011. The company says movement in home prices began to stabilize somewhat during the latter half of the year and REO sales as a percentage of total home sales began to decline, which helped to moderate depreciation for the year overall.

In 2012, Clear Capital is forecasting U.S. home prices to show continued stabilization with a slight gain of 0.2 percent across all markets. That would put national home prices near levels not seen since 2001.

“Overall, 2011 was a relatively quiet year for U.S. home prices compared to the last five years,” said Dr. Alex Villacorta, director of research and analytics at Clear Capital. “With national prices down a little more than two percent for the year and sitting at their lowest point since 2001, our projections show that the current balance the market has found will continue through 2012.”

According to Clear Capital, the importance of micro-market analysis becomes plainly apparent as the 2012 forecast is for a flat U.S. market, but only 40 percent of individual markets (20 of 50) are projected to be stable.

Individual markets reacting to their local economic drivers will exhibit a wide range of performance levels, Dr. Villacorta explained.

When looking at distinct metro market areas, it turns out only 24 percent showed signs of stabilization in 2011, while the others are still moving more dramatically higher or lower, Villacorta explained.

“What’s most interesting is that the lower segments of appreciating markets are driving much of the current price growth,” Villacorta said. “In places like Florida, which have historically been hard hit, we are now seeing