The last few months have brought about the biggest changes in SEO that I've ever seen in the 6 years I've been in the business. Honestly, I think the general BUSINESS of SEO is about over with. It's become a 3- 4 part process that can't be completed by a company with a bunch of kids doing assembly-line linking or the outsourced link-spamming from India and Pakistan.

Reciprocal linking is for all practical purposes, worthless now. If you don't have one-way links coming in to your website, Google is ignoring it. There are alot of ways to get one-way links...although most of them either cost a good bit to produce (such as a press release) or are on such low ranked pages that it takes hundreds of them to do much good. Basically, you HAVE to have a blog. You have to know HOW to blog for SEO...it involves more than scribbling down some off-the-wall sales jargon once a day.

You should be writing informational or insightful articles about your neighborhood...the communities in your area, perhaps the way mortgages and foreclosures are affecting your local area's real estate sales. If you can't write, or can't spell, or aren't interested in sharing your thoughts, then hire someone locally that can and is. This is NOT something you can outsource to the cheap labor in Taiwan, no matter how much they swear they can do it. To do it correctly, you need someone who knows about your area. Try your secretary. See if she has a kid in college that can write. Find another local college kid to do it. Maybe your own wife or girlfriend would like to make a little extra money.

I purposely aimed at women for this task, as I've only seen a handful of men out of thousands that can spell or use grammar correctly these days. Honestly, I don't know how most of these guys ever got out of high school...much less became college graduates. But maybe you are one of the exceptions, or know a "guy nerd" (yes, there are GIRL nerds, too!) who is. Usually, it will be easier to find a woman to do your writing.

My advice is to use Google's Blogger for your blog, and adjust the publishing settings to make it a part of your website. Word Press blogs are better looking, and seem to have a great system for categorizing your posts to be the most effective for SEO purposes...but they are difficult for anyone less than a programmer to set up, and most real estate agents are going to need simplicity. It doesn't get much easier than Blogger, and Google loves their own products. This is just my personal preference from dealing with agents and their time and concentration constraints.

One of the social sites, ActiveRain.com is a powerful tool for realtors, and the blogs there do very well to promote your website. If you have enough manpower or time to do it, I would suggest having a second blog on that site. Be sure and visit Feedburner and get your blog set up to ping them so your feed will be public. Also hook your blog up to Addthis.com and put a button in the template so your posts can go to Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and some of the other social sites.

Every post you make that has a link to your site in it will multiply those links through the social sites. Even a blog can get complicated now, and is best left to be set up by an SEO person, at least in the beginning.

At this time, press releases are still the single most effective way to get links. PRWeb.com is still the best at this. It costs a minimum of $200 for the upgrade of their service that allows you to insert links in your document. If you don't know how to write one yourself, then find someone who does, or you can pay them several hundred dollars more and they will do it for you.

These press releases go out to Yahoo News, Google News, MSN News, CNN, ABC, and all the media sites. It would have to be a very interesting article for CNN to pick up...but I personally know of a realtor friend who ended up being interviewed on tv from one she did...so you can't disclaim it. Other blogs pick up press releases, hopefully maintaining the links, and you can end up with some major incoming links from one press release. Search engines really do like them, and I personally think they may add an authority factor to your website, especially if you have an office address on both.

There are some article sites that you can submit articles to, either free or some for a fee. But almost none of them allow links in the article...and even if they give you a signature box at the end, you can probably assume they've been marked so as to not pass on any page rank. This is done by inserting a "rel-'nofollow" tag, and Google has encouraged it to the point of being ridiculous. I, myself don't bother with most article submission sites. With the exception of SiteProNews, and ezinearticles.com, there aren't any that I can honestly recommend.

Yes, you need to join MySpace. Yes, join Facebook. Plaxo Pulse is a new social site that Plaxo has started, and it's rumored Google is going to purchase the company. Plaxo has been around for many years as a toolbar for Outlook, and they are reputable and useful. YouTube is now almost a social site, and videos are GREAT real estate tools! MSN has their own video service, and so does Yahoo and AOL. You could spend a week joining all the social sites. They are a pain in the butt for the most part...but most allow you to link to your website and your blog, so are worthwhile in the long run.

I personally think every realtor should have 2 websites. One to showcase property the best way, and the other one to drive traffic to it and provide links. It all amounts to alot of money, and way too much time involved for the average realtor. Only you can decide if you can make one or two sales from the site and pay for it all. (Can we say DUH? )

Anyway, let's all hope the market comes back soon, and maybe you can use the slow times to work on websites and BLOG till your fingers bleed....:-) Get those websites up in the rankings and powerful now when you have the resources, and when the buyers come back in droves, you'll be making millions.

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