It’s not a secret now, but the day google revealed how much money it was making showing little text ads, everyone was shocked. Fortunately for every one of us the era of “1000 visitors for $20″ advertising model is gone. Now we dont need to browse the internet till we see something we like. Now we demand it by search.

Even though most companies already know the power of google, some still don’t and you know why? Because it’s not tangible! When a company orders a TV or radio commercial, they can watch or listen to it, they know when and where it’s going to be broadcasted. Since a search result is just a line of text some companies consider it ineffective. Oh, how wrong they are!

The second mistake companies make is assuming that since it’s just a line of text, it does not require a lot of resources to create and therefore it’s got to be very cheap.

Well, first of all, no matter what kind of business your search traffic is the most reliable resource of potential clients: they are carefully targeted by a search engine and your SEO company.

As for he second point, I have already mentioned that the era of “1000 visitors for $20″ advertising model is gone. The SEO and Internet marketing company has to optimize your site to make sure correct information is conveyed to search engines. In a meanwhile the web design company has to make sure the design is attractive and professional enough so the visitor picks up the phone or fills out the contact form on the site.

Once your internal marketing or SEO is done it’s time for the Web design and SEO company to move on to EXTERNAL marketing. This is where the things get complicated. Your website must be submitted to hundreds of online business directories, as well as hundreds of search engines and online classifieds (daily). It’s NOT necessary done for a random lead from there but first first of all is to convince “big guys” such as google, yahoo, bing, etc that your website is a REAL DEAL: you want to have an many external links as possible.

Now, that’s still not it, I will not repeat things I wrote previously about  PPC (pay per click) – those things are pretty clear, but we are talking about THE MOST EFFECTIVE SEO PRACTICES and PPC is NOT one of them.

The last step that a professional web design and internet marketing company  must do is to set up a SMM (social media marketing) campaign. It all starts with a blog. Weather you want it or not you should have it – google likes it, yahoo likes it – it means you should like it too. Apart from blogging many other things have to be done such as article and press release submissions. Again, you cant get away with saying “I have nothing to write about” – you can always find something to write about and good SEO companies do it for you. Once your blog is up and running the last step is to start twittering and participate in professional social networks – it will help your immediate exposure – again good SEO companies do it for you.

As you can see all this requires a lot of time and skill. Most of the time one person can’t do it all, that is why web design and SEO companies are taking a lead. They can do it faster, better, and for far less then an extra employee hired to work full time.

In the last part of this entry I want to talk about SEO budgets.

Internet advertising and marketing budgets have also soared but the stakes are still high. Real professional internet marketing companies will allow you to set your own budget. In most cases the LOWEST monthly budget is $800 – $1000 (Still !MUCH! lower then a radio or TV advertisement). Good internet marketing company will pick the right marketing methods and approaches for you. Make sure to talk to your SEO company before writing a check. Make sure your internet marketing company provides you with traffic analytics so you could track your ROI (return on investment). Make sure to be patient, if you have never done internet marketing it may take up to three months before you make to the desirable firs page of search results.

Have a good search!

Websites like Craigslist, Backpage, Gooogle Base, etc made it really easy and FREE to have your listings exposed to hundreds of potential clients every day.

Now. Let’s assume that your website is not connected to the listing database. Most of your daily routine is cutting and pasting , creating content, and publishing ads online.

On the other hand you may have gone further: You may have a dynamic website that publishes all the listings from your database into your site. Some solutions even allow to publish your ad right from your website backend. These solutions are perfect for big sized businesses.However we would suggest calling a few companies before going to a big and famous. Sometimes product offered by smaller companies is much better then well known solution.

Since I live in Boston I happened to know many real estate companies and real estate web solutions. Companies go after solutions like Dreaming Code or Boston logic because the names are well know. I know at least three other smaller companies that do a much better job for a competitive price.

My article is not as much about the real estate solutions as much about presenting your listings online. It’s not enough to have a website. Your listings should be blasted daily on all of the classifieds, public databases, sites like boston.com, Bigcityapartments.com, Hotpads.com, Bostonapartments.com and many others.

Real Estate Marketing is a service that offers you to outsource all this repetitive job to another company (using the third party is much more affordable then using the same web design companies) that would push your listing on the websites/classifieds of your choice. This will drive targeted traffic to your website from the classifieds, from search engine providing you with hot leads and booing you website rank.

Chao!

Search engines use programs called crawlers or spiders that follow the links from page to page and analyze, index and add a page to the database. SEO can work for almost all businesses- whether it’s SEO for real estate or SEO for a doctor’s office.

To keep up with the competition and to be in front of your potential customers constantly, SEO is the way to go. Get a professional website design, optimize it with keywords specific to your industry, create proper links and monitor the performance of your website to shine on the web and to reap the benefits of an amazing online presence.