What is SEO?  Search engine optimization.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 4 years, you’ve surely heard of it…  But wait,  you are in the real estate industry, right?  This is an industry that has been dragged into technology kicking and screaming the whole way.  We have monopolistic MLS’s that seem to make matters worst as far as getting your listing data out to the widest audience as possible.

The question for most real estate agents is probably “Where do I start?”  The options are overwhelming and there are an incredible number of websites that are glad to take your money.  Rest assured, everything I’m going to tell you about is free.  None of it works without a bit of effort though so here are my suggestions:

www.postlets.com – This is one of the first things you should be doing with every listing you get.  Go to postlets and enter your listing.  You can moan and groan all you want about having to enter your listing in yet another place but don’t be lazy, this is free and doesn’t take all that much effort.  Postlets does MANY valuable things.  First off, it syndicates your listing to Google Base, Oodle, HotPads, Trulia, DotHomes, Backpage, Vast, Enormo, Front Door and my personal favorite, Zillow.  Next cool thing, it allows you to post your listing to all of your social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc.  Another nifty thing it does is makes you a pretty ad for craigslist.  All you have to do is copy and paste the code it generates into the description box on craiglist and presto, you’re practically done.  Postlets also creates a one page website for your listing.  That gives you a link that you can pass around and use in other online marketing efforts.  Lastly, another one of my favorite things that postlets does is creates a custom webpage for you, the agent.  Check out my postlets site here to see what this looks like.  Something I really like about that page it creates is that it generates a map of where all of my listings are.  This is good for illustrating your service area.  One more small touch of information I’ll mention is that postlets allows you to insert the code for Google Analytics.  This is invaluable for tracking where your hits are coming from and how many you are getting.  This is a topic for a whole other article though.

www.zillow.com – The entire real estate profession came unglued when Zillow first started publishing their infamous Zestimates.  How horrible that this data is easily put into our client’s hands!  I’m sure you now realize, Zillow is here to stay.  Like it or not, they are currently the #2 real estate web site.  Instead of fighting this, embrace it.  These guys ROCK for your SEO.  Their links are followed and indexed by google.  I encourage you to create a user profile on Zillow with links back to your own home page.  I won’t give away all of my Zillow secrets here but let’s just say I’ve had 4 leads per month directly from my activity on Zillow and that number seems to be climbing.  Get your profile on there at the very least people.

www.twitter.com – When I first looked at Twitter I thought, “what a useless waste of time”.  Oh how wrong I was.  Twitter gets indexed by Google FABULOUSLY.  If you can think of NOTHING ELSE to tweet, at least use your postlets account Twitter feature and post your listings.  This helps your SEO something fierce.  Start doing this stuff and then try googling one of your listing’s addresses.  Your twitter should be in the top 10 results.  Since I’m using analytics I can see that probably 10% of my traffic is currently coming from twitter and I’m gaining followers just by posting.  Check out my twitter page to see how I am using it.

Google Profiles – When you google your name, what do you get?  Is it some post you made on the Usenet 10 years ago where you were flaming someone because they disagreed with you?  Is it relevant?  Ultimately your name is your calling card.  You should take charge of it on google and make sure you like what you see.  If not, here is one chance to change it and another chance for back links to your website or blog.  If you have a google profile, this is the first thing someone will see when they google your name.  I suggest you put it to good use.  Hopefully one of your doppelgangers hasn’t already grabbed your name.

My goal is not to overwhelm you here.  I’m simply trying to give you the list I wish I had 4 years ago.  I’d say I wish I had it from the beginning, but some of this stuff didn’t exist in 2002 when I started real estate and if it did, it probably wasn’t that relevant to selling homes.  Whatever the case, these are different times we live in.  The industry is now driven by information empowered clients instead of by stuffy old brokerages bent on domination.  The clients are getting this information one way or the other; what is best for you, the real estate agent, is to make it easy for them to get and to make sure your name is attached to it.