Many of you are being approached daily in your in-box, on the phone, in high-cost PPC campaigns, and in every way to buy SEO services.  If that many people are out there pushing these mostly over-priced, and very often outdated services, it is time again to remind you all that SEO is dying a slow death, and that, as the coding standards are more and more standardized, it will disappear completely very soon, and your traffic if it is predicated on these outdated techniques: DO NOT BUY THESE SERVICES WITHOUT READING THIS!

In a recent string at Realtown, a Realtor asked for feedback on Compass Internet Systems (an SEO spin-off from the failed Coracle after the takeover from the investors).

I am sharing the meat of my reply here because it is timely and relevant:

Right on Gwen, and Win: the goal of an SEO firm, and many old-fashioned web-design firms, is to create a dependent, when in reality, a successful effort works the SEO vendor out of a job immediately. That is the reason for the poor service: clients do not last, representatives burn out.

A far better solution (and much less expensive, BTW) is to automate and plan your web presence in such a way that you become independent of needing any consultant.

This can be done for less that $500, and if the CMS (content management system) is properly setup, the SEO effect is automatic,, and ongoing without further expense, except for hosting.

When the second round investors destroyed the company that Compass is actually a spin-off of, it was because they wanted to hide what we were doing, to somehow guard a trade secret, to trademark something.

I would liken this to protecting milk on the shelf at room temperature.

Internet marketing, and marketing in general, is not about megalomaniacs who want to find a way to make a un-Godly amount of money: it is not about protecting anything proprietary: because like milk at room temperature, any advantage is temporary on the Internet, if it is not of real value.

The basic concept of SEO is to help an undeserving website somehow excel over a more deserving one due to a technology gap. A much less expensive, more sustainable solution is to actually create a genuine online resource that ranks on Google because it should, because of it's value: and we are heading quickly towards a time when nothing else will work, due to advancement in Google's algorithms, and the gradual standardization of coding standards.

While it is often a much less popular approach amongst the greediest and laziest among you ( the ones that, for the most part, will not be here next year), our advice (mine) has always been much more old fashioned, in a way, although I actually invented much of what SEO vendors sell: we recommend designing an online resource of some kind, that targets a niche market (for a Realtor this can be a community blog, an affinity group niche informational site, a school guide...)

Such a resource in owned by you, travels with you from broker and firm to wherever your career takes you, and even has the potential to out value the underlying core business if you are successful.

When you add-in that it is also the most effective SEO model, and the most cost effective (as Win pointed out) method of marketing Real Estate, and establishing your brand or proper name as the source (what we call an 'authority source'), the decision to use such an approach is a no-brainier, whether you do it by trusting a reliable vendor with a good reputation and excellent rankings of their own, or by learning to do it all yourself, which is free and doable, but, in the long run, even more expensive than outdated SEO services.

Think about how you found your vendor, or, did they find you?

I am Israel Rothman: Google me, or Google 'social media website design' or 'Internet advertising consultant' or 'Realtor SEM' or 'Realtor SMO'

My clients call me on th phone and have already sold themselves: all I have to do is not screw it up.

I got three foreign clients last month, one in London, one in Australia, and one in Japan. Isn't that they way you want your Real Estate business to work, as your own lead generator?

Check out Spermcenter.com (no it is legitimate, not that at all) as an example of an enterprise-level Drupal site launched yesterday, with custom search functions and real value. I will let you guess what the client does, and why this approach was used

I am Israel Rothman; no secrets: Google me, then call me.