I am continually amazed at how loosely SEO is thrown around and marketed to agents. More and more I find that the average agent doesn't really even understand exactly how SEO works in today's technology. There are many companies out there that try to sell you some sort of 'voodoo' or 'hi tech' explanation of how SEO is achieved, but the simple truth is in today's technology, it's not that complicated...

First of all, let's look at how technology - specifically, how the search engines actually operate...

In previous years (before the standard of the internet was 'fast') getting SEO was a little more tricky and complicated and little words like 'meta tags' were actually one of the tricks of how SEO was achieved. Nowadays, the Google's and Yahoos are able to cache entire web pages at a time so meta tags and keywords really don't matter.

What matters is EXPOSURE - now, one of the big the secrets is LINKS. Ranking is determined by how many links to the specific website gets cached by the search engine web crawlers, in addition to how many hits the website gets and how many hits the links to that website get make up the 'ranking' of that web page.

The big 'secret' is that all it takes to get free top SEO is to get as many links to your webpage out there and get as much traffic on those links as possible.

For example, on my operating system for agents (Agent Control) - we allow you to easily share your website and your listing to 300+ locations on the web! By sharing your links to your website and links to your listings to 300+ places, you are doing your own SEO at the same time you are doing your job anyway. Just putting your listing on Facebook and Twitter aren't going to cut it - you need to get links out to as many places as possible. By doing this, you will get top ranking without spending a dime.

Hope this helps...

Madison

www.themalibulife.com

That's true, anyone can do their own SEO. It's a lot easier said than done.

How many agents really have the time to do that? Especially the very busy ones. There's a lot of time put into first learning about SEO, then finding websites and places that will send you links your way.

You could either spend hours a day implementing SEO for your website, or hire someone 3rd party and use that time to network and find new clients. Then you can decide which option is worth your time.

You are exactly right, but that is one of the reasons that I helped create Agent Control. Just about every product out there that offers simple sharing only goes to the biggies (facebook, twitter, wordpress, linked in) which is nice but not helpful to really brand yourself and the listing all over the place.

With Agent Control, it is a one button click to share to 300 places that allow links back to the listing and your site. It also brands you to your listings no matter where it's posted. Once you take the time to set-up free accounts at all the destinations, which admittedly is a couple hours work - then it is one click to share from then on. I can create a listing and link and share it to over 300 places within 5-10 minuets. Many times, I do this right from my cell phone in front of the customer to illustrate how quickly and effectively I can get the property moving. It always impresses.

I know this sounds like a plug for Agent Control - and I guess it kind of is, but my main point is to show how I do it through Agent Control but you don't 'have' to have Agent Control to do that. It would just take a little longer but you can share and link your listings all over the place and once you get some sort of system, it would not take the 'days' you think it would. Perhaps a couple hours, but in my opinion, a couple hours spent marketing a listing online should be done anyway. If you are doing anything that is done in seconds or minuets and that is all you are relying on, then you are not putting enough effort into the marketing side. All my opinion and I'm just speaking in general - not specific to you or anyone.

Before Agent Control - I still did exactly as I describe for every listing (mass linking and sharing) - it just took longer and was a little more difficult but certainly doable. Besides having complete control over your site and having all needs in one place, sharing was the next biggest thing I wanted to accomplish in a system because of the headaches of it all.

Finding websites that will send links your way is not really what I'm talking about and not necessary for SEO and ranking. You want to put YOUR links everywhere and that is free to do on TONS of social and listing service sites on the web.

That is one of the biggest myths of all sorry to say. Not the linking part - links are very important. The myth is that traffic is beneficial to ranking. That is a myth derived from and every bit as large as the old myth that Alexa ranking (based on traffic) boosts your rank in search engines.

The traffic is more important to YOU than the ranking - but linking is the real key. Creating traffic is better than SEO ranking so accomplishing both is a win win IMO.

I'll quickly point out a couple of issues with this post.



This is what perpetuates SEO 'myths'. First, meta titles and descriptions are the most important aspects of on-site optimization. to summarily say that it 'really dont matter' does a disservice to those who are at the beginning stages of learning SEO. Not only are titles and descriptions the first thing that the SE spiders crawl, but it will also be (most likely, depending on the search itself and how it relates to the content on the page) what is shown on the SERPs. Writing descriptive yet concise tags can help significantly increase your click-through rate.



Yes, having quality inbound links to your site weighs heavily in SE algorhythms, but to say that "all it takes to get free top SEO is to get as many links" is overly simplistic. It's not just a matter of having 'as many links to your webpage out there', but it's also a matter of how the inbound domain/page relates to your niche and the PR of the page on which the link is placed. I'd personally rather have 1 link from a PR6 real estate page than 500 PR0 links. Compare how easy it is to get 1000 links from forum signatures to what it takes to get a link on a legitimate PR6 real estate page.

I get it, plugging your AgentControl to syndicate listings is one thing, but stating that it will significantly increase a website's SEO is far fetched. If you can provide examples of how AgentControl has helped clients improve their placement on the SERPs, then that would go a long way towards gaining credibility.