Perhaps someone will point out why this doesn't actually work, but I've seen backlinks show up on more than one of my sites due to this.

Head to "your region/city" page on Wikipedia. Head down to the bottom and view the external links. Add your site with the anchor text "your area real estate" or something to that affect.

I've done a few of them, some stay up for long periods, some are edit'ed out. Wikipedia had nofollow tags so you won't get any "link juice" out of it, but it's a well respected site and is scraped all the time give you numerous backlinks.

Can't get a link to stay up? Try looking at the other links currently there, copying them on to a new page of your website and replace the original link with one to your new page. A little sneakier, but it can work as well.

Mike, that's an interesting concept, do you find it works well for you? Even though their isn't any "link juice" because of the nofollow attribute, I think getting a link from Wikipedia goes a long way in getting Google to trust your site and see it as an authority.

I'm not an expert so this may not do anything substantial, but at the worst it isn't going to hurt. My SEO approach has been do everything I can that doesn't cost much, hahaha.

I'm currently number 1 and 4 for "Oshawa Real Estate" so either my competition is terrible or some of what I'm doing is working

My understanding was that Wiki links were typically edited out for commercial sites unless it provided a value (i.e. reference) worth keeping in the article. Either way, best of luck.

This does not work !
I tried it and got banned.
At first I thought this was a great idea but it's not allowed.

If wiki allowed this, every page would be full of spam and completely degrade the value of that site.

This sounds like black hat but not as bad. More like gray hat Lol. I don’t think it will have enough effect to spend too much time on, but hey, if it floats your boat go ahead.

I think no-follow holds no link juice, so... "getting a link from Wikipedia goes a long way in getting Google to trust your site and see it as an authority..." would not be true. Googlebots don't say to themselves "Oh its wikipedia, so although it is no-follow, we still like this site better now." No-follow is no-follow I believe.

With that being said, I'm headed to Wikipedia now...lol

There are many low cost resources to getting quality backlinks for attaining first page search results, especially on Google.

It is almost scary how easy it is to outrank the "big boys" on google for local search queries such as "(your city) homes for sale", etc.

A properly optimized premium wordpress site can achieve this even faster with the proper backlinking strategy.