Some people "pooh-pooh" agents trying to get their site to come up high on organic (non-paid) search engine results. They suggest agents rely instead on pay-per-click advertising.

This is off base. Striving to come up high in organic search results is worthwhile, and every agent with a website should work hard at it.

One article I've read recently pretty much dismisses the ability of an agent to build for himself, or hire someone to build, a website that has much chance of ending up very high on search engine results.

Yes, it takes a while for an agent's site to get indexed by engines; yes, it takes time to gain both reciprocated and unreciprocated links that make a search engine like Google or Yahoo start pushing a site to the top of organic search results, but so what? Once the site is on page one, every resultant lead that gets turned into a sale way more than pays for all the effort that this took.

My Realtor wife was spending $3,500 per month buying pay-per-click, key word, top positions through Overture.com, the leading PPC provider (now owned by Yahoo.) She spent this amount during the time that her site was slowly crawling up to the top of the Google, Yahoo, and AOL search results pages (SERPs) for words like Orange County Real Estate, Orange County Realtor, Orange County MLS, Orange County CA 1031 and many more.

But one day several years ago, all the effort paid off. Her site did reach the number one position for many key word phrases, and on that day she quit buying PPC ads on Overture.

That was a savings of $42,000 a year. Yet agents are being advised that what she did is mostly a waste of time because the search engines could change their algorithms overnight, and an agent's site could suddenly disappear.

Yet, her site, and those of many other agents whom we know, has stayed solidly in the one or two position on the top engines for many years. Why? Because such sites were made correctly right from the start; they were not the product of sneaky or purchased links, or other trickery that search engines ultimately discover and squelch. When you build a site correctly, it generally remains in its same high position when algorithms change.

Agents whom I know well, and who pushed their sites to the top of organic searches for their areas, include Drew Hartanov in San Clemente, CA; Fran Vernon in LaCanada, CA, Jeff Manson in Oahu, HI, Bob Wilson in San Diego, CA, Wendy Pickard in Thousand Oaks, CA, Mike Stark in Newport Beach, CA, Brad Coleman in Laguna Niguel, CA, Diann Tonnesen in Las Vegas and scores more who sweated their websites onto the top of organic search engine results, thereby saving them tons of money in not buying PPC ads.

The article that I saw most recently says that trying to rely solely on organic search results is "just getting trapped in the 'build a better website' mentality." Well, I beg to differ.

Perhaps that is something more appropriate to say to rich agents who have loads of money to spend on PPC advertising. Many of those agents, often of the "old school/resist technology" bent, are likely to have bought expensive but ineffective websites that are not especially known for their ability to come up well on organic searches in Google and Yahoo.

In such cases, when the rich agents might question why their sites are not coming up high, organically, on SERPs, telling them to go eat cake and just buy their position on search engines, instead of doing some work to earn the position, for free, might be a worthwhile tactic to explain away why the sites do not perform that well.

Regardless of what any article say, you can rise up higher on organic search engine results if you just stick with it. And despite any article's semi-trashing of SEO people's skills and motivation, they can greatly shorten the time that it takes a site to rise up quite high.

Can the search engine algorithms change and drop a site from a former lofty position once obtained? Yes, and it has happened. But I note with satisfaction that it did not happen to my wife's site, nor to those other agents I mentioned above, and likely to thousands more who had done their sites, including custom and template sites, properly.

I recommend going all out, yourself, to get your site listed high up on organic search results. Meanwhile, a little side help from PPC doesn't hurt, either. But once your site starts bringing in inquiries from the organic side, feel free to cut back on PPC.

I agree that PPC is the only absolutely certain way to keep your site high on SERPs -- but only if you are willing to pay, in some metro markets, $2 to $8 per click to be in the top three paid positions atop a page -- and those are the positions that produce the most abundant inquiries.

While the top producer buyers of extremely expensive-to-buy-and-host, turn-key web sites can afford PPC, what about the bulk of agents who cannot?

What about the valuable SEO people that that article dismisses? I say that all agents with a site that is struggling to break through to page one, two or three on SERPs, might consider hiring a SEO person to make a quantum breakthrough. But only get one who has a track record.

Only hire a SEO who comes highly recommended by agents outside your marketing area whose sites appear high on SERPs. To find such high ranking agents who might know good SEO people, search yourself for "A City Name + 'real estate'." Naturally, agents who have found success with SEO people in your same marketplace will clam up, so only ask high-ranking agents in other city markets who they used for SEO.

The bottom line? Keep on getting your reciprocal links. Keep on getting quality links and enhanced links, and free links, and reciprocal links to your site on truly relevant, authority websites that are definitely in the real estate or closely related fields.

Most of all, keep adding more and more fabulous content to your site so that visitors literally swoon when they see all that awaits them there.

And punctuate your text with key words that will make the search engines notice you. And update your meta tags. Do all this and you greatly reduce your need for PPC advertising. Do this and you will take considerable pride in your own, carefully modified site, and what you, yourself, have achieved. If you run across one of those other articles which say that you can't, ignore what they say. PPC is not the only way.

Published: September 6, 2005

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .