Promoting Like It's 1999

So I was working with one of the agents in my office one-on-one to see what we could do to increase her free search placement. Since I hadn't done paid promotions for about 5 years I thought that I would do a quick search to find out how and what to do currently to make the search engines happy.

Well come to find out the exact same things that I was doing in 1999 work today (and are much cheaper than paying hundreds of dollars for SEO - search engine optimization). I will give you my top 5 list of things you can do to make a difference in your placement.

1. Your URL - make sure that your site has a good www.yourname.com. Take a few minutes to pick something that the search engines can understand. In less than three minutes I came up with www.TampaBaysBestRealtor.com, www.TampaBaysAgent.com, and www.AOneAgent.com.

2. Little Sites - having one main site is a good thing, use it for all your marketing BUT make little sites that focus on only one aspect of your business. www.TampaBay55Plus.com could be a 2 page site that had a BUNCH of information about the Tampa Bay area and specifically communities that featured 55+ living on the front page, links to all your other sites and a link to a contact us page that would "feed" into Top Producer. For an example of this kind of site see TampaBayUnder200K.com. These are comparable to "doorway pages" which are a keyword packed page that search engines can index but that are part of your big site. I think you get way more bang for your buck by have several small sites that the engines can index separately - especially since they feel top level sites are better than subpages of your main site.

3. Content - have great keyword rich content that matches your title, keywords and description. Make sure that your links are hyperlinks that describe what you are sending people to - in other words make your link say "On Top Of The World - 55+ Community" instead of "click here".

4. Submit your site to many different search engines. There are two free tools that I can recommend - Site Submission Beta and SEO Studio . They are both a little hard to get set up, but once they are ready to go regular submissions are a breeze.

5. Adwords or Overture - OKAY you got me - they did not have these two paid submission opportunities in 1999! BUT that having been said, paying just a couple of bucks a day can help to jump start your search submissions and hopefully you can pay less and have more "real" results fast!