Seeking feedback from the community here on a new project of mine

[sfmatthews]

First off, thanks to what I can already tell is a great community here. I've never seen so much solid information in one place.

I am working on a real estate website that brings a better experience to high end lake front home buyers in our area. The lakes name is Lake Keowee and it is in Seneca, SC. My url is keoweepremier.com

Some of the top competitors seem to use link exchange options that don't seem relavent, yet they are ranking quite high.

I am only a month or two in, and just looking for feedback from you all on tips for my path forward and approximately how long it will take to you some of my work pay off in the results. Still waiting for my dmoz listing to be approved for now, arghh.

Thanks, Steven

[Aran_Smithson]

Hi Steven,

I like your site, its clean and fresh and user friendly. Not sure what you have done with regards to link building however it may be worth while to create some guest posts to put on to other blogs and get some nice links coming in.

Unfortunately, your competitors are well established with a long standing clean relationship with Google and some authority links. Try acquiring some links from some of your competitors link partners.

Good luck!

Cheers

Aran

[EGOL]

Just sayin...

I would edit competitor's URL out of your post.  This forum gets indexed quickly and ranks impressively well.  I can already find your post ranking for competitor's URL plus one word.

I think that you will be surprised at how much work will be required to beat them.

[sfmatthews]

Thanks for the feedback, I edited the url out. That said, the site offers a link exchange where it seems they link to everything under the sun and visa versa. The content itself seems very thin and yet google has them showing #2 or so in the serps. As for the inbound links, some are relavent, but many not. Why wouldn't google see through something like this.

As an aside EGOL, I have ready many of your responses to others post and I appreciate your level of knowledge on such things and thanks for the feedback.

I want to compete, but I want to do it the "right way" or "honest way" if there is such a thing.

Steven