Hi Nathan,

I am going to be on an MLS tour starting in October doing lots of Hands on, How to SEO workshops. You can bring my SEO Workshop to your town by asking your MLS board to schedule me for a visit.

In the meantime, these are the golden rules of SEO you should follow; 

1.) Get yourself an SEO friendly domain name. 

Bag your own name. Like BobSellsDetroit.com. It doesn't work anymore. Get a domain like:  DetroitHomefinders.com or .net. Add the Word: Moves, or Select, Team or Preferred to the city-geographic name. And keep it short, like:  ColoradoSpringsTeam.com  

2.) Competitive Analysis. Recon. Hooo-Rah. 

You are ex military I guess from your photo (so am I) so do the recon on Broker Bob and the others out there now on page one. Analyze their strenghths, weaknesses. Do a search for "your city + real estate," and the term "your city + homes for sale" and see if the same websites show up on page one of Google. Print out their website's home page and take a highlighter and hi-lite the key phrases on their site.

Now, take a piece of duralene (tracing paper) and print out your home page and OVER LAY it with your competitors. Take a different color hi-lighter and hi-lite the key phrases on your home page.

Chances are pretty good, that Broker Bob from Amazing Realty has more dense, more relevant key words than you do.

You either take your existing words and move them UP higher on your page than Broker Bob. Then add a few more of the relevant key words and make sure these are text links that POINT inwards on your site to other pages. This is called SILO-ing. Google loves this.

Be sure you do NOT OVER DO it. Keep your relevant key words on one page to 3% to 5% maximum per ad copy. Meaning if you have 500 words on your home page or any landing page with the relevant key words, be sure to stay under 5% total key phrases for the total amount of optimized ad copy on your page.

3.) Where are you hosting right now? Basement company? 2 Guys in a Garage?

You need to move your site to a real professional hosting company. I have used them all. Go Daddy. HostWay. 1 and 1 Internet (is about the worst in my humble opinion), and Verio. I love Rackspace.com. They don't get black listed like the other firms do and they have lots of clean, scrubbed Class C IP blocks which is another thing that Google Loves. 

4.) Traffic. Traffic. Traffic.

You need LOTS of one way incoming links to your website. One of the most affordable places to buy a block of one way incoming links from high Google PR sites 5/10, 6/10 is Rank4Sales.com.  Call them and ask for Serge Thibodeau.  Tell Serge that Bart sent you and he will have a very special price for you.

They are in Canada, but they have more than 15,000 customers. They also have a huge bank of Websites able and willing to SELL you one way links. 

Be prepared to shell out $250 - $300 a month for this service and you will get five to eight high quality links to your site. Do this for a minimum of six months.

5.) Press Releases

The big secret of PR is out. 1888PressRelease.com is the way to go. The oxy moron is, if you spend $50 bucks on a PR, then you get guaranteed inclusion in Google and many social media networks. So SPEND the $50 and do a PR once every three months. 

6.) Contests.

Do not violate RESPA, but think of things that people will love to see and enter when they come to your website.

a.) Offer a FREE Gas for the Summer contest. People are moving to your town anyway. So why not buy a $1,000 gas card from Shell Gas and then use a Press Release story to tell the world about it?

This is good because you will piss off Broker Bob at Amazing Realty because you have a better idea. This business is cut throat anyway. My SEO book covers lots of Guerilla Marketing tactics you can use to send more eyeballs to YOUR site than Broker Bob.

b.) FREE Closing Costs. This one will hurt a bit, but it will drive traffic to your website like you would not believe. Same thing though, -- ADVERTISE this in your local paper, radio and do a Press Release on this one.

c.) Go to Sears, Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a Washer Dryer. Give this away as a free prize on your website. Be careful not to imply that the next time home buyer HAS to buy from you as this gets into some sticky situations whereby you might get slapped by the local REALTOR Commission. 

7.) Template Websites. 

Like the famous hamburger chain, billions might have been already served.

But McWebsites are no different. Sure millions of REALTORS might have been served by them, but they ain't lovin it, I can assure you of that.

In my 12 years at Voyager the customer complaints and headaches I see are always the same. The broker has a website with Advanced Access. A La Mode. Homes.com, Point2Agent and they can't seem to get themselves on page one of Google (naturally). 99% of them will never rank naturally on Google and you cannot hand tool the CSS or html code for many of them.

The package deals might sound good, and the lure is you save money. But you can't escape the fact that you have to spend money to make money.

8.) How long are you registering your Domain For?

This is a easy mistake to fix. Google is looking for a few things, one of them is now your domain name. The world of real estate is getting too crowded on line. Not every website can naturally rank on page one. There's just 10 positions.

So in order to put the odds in your favor, push your domain name registration out 7 to 10 years. Google has a secondary search criterion that looks at pretty, optimized websites and NOW -- the AGE of your domain name.  So do this. It's cheap insurance. 

9.) Fast Lead Generation (cheap, too!)

Go here. ColoradoSpringsTeam.com  Go here:  TREORealtors.com  Go Here: Voyager360.com  See something in common? Look for the 2-way chat box.

This is a very simple and inexpensive way to get next time homebuyers to CHAT with you. They love it because it does not require registration. Put this chat box on your Website NEXT to your IDX results pages.

Watch the LEADS pour into your site. When you are at your computer, just click the Live App program and wait for the Doorbell sound. This means someone is on your site and wants to ask a question.

People will ask questions of you and if you are sitting at your DESK, you can chat with them. If you are not at your computer, the chat box turns into a lead generating center that sends short messages to your email or smart phone like iPhone or Blackberry. 

This will increase your leads as much as 48%. Trust me. I added to our site and sales have NEVER been better.

SAVE $$$

Go here and sign up for FREE. 

Then if you want the LITE version, enter this CODE:  ARE1995

If you want the PRO Version, enter this code:  ARE4995

For the 1995 CODE, you will get $10 off a month. For the Pro version, you will get $20 off. I have no clue how long that code will last, so you might want to act now. Because I know it still works. 

By the way, LiveHuman offers this same package for $100 a month. So if you like to save money, you want more leads... GET the LiveWebsite chat. We love the tool and like I said, our leads have tripled. 

More good stuff later...

- Bartman