Why is SEO so mysterious, and why do we often run into schemers to can promise the world and invariably under-deliver, typically by a huge margin? One of the facts, in this case, is that the only people who really know how to cheat the system are Google themselves. This is further complicated by the fact that their algorithms and engines are in a state of constant flux, always adjusting, always trying to improve. They have many billions of dollars at stake after all and are incredibly well aware of how useless their engine would be if it were to be exploited.

Also, consider that if you attempted to tackle this path, that you'll be competing with Zillow, Trulia,Realtor.com, and other massive-scale vendors that make this approach daunting, to say the least. Well, actually, impossible. Unless you have a few hundred million dollars to spare. Google is in the business of forcing companies to pay to advertise and, therefore, make it nearly impossible for the typical agent to put a dent in SEO placement. To attempt effective "SEO", it would cost hundreds of dollars per keyword with little to no chance it will work.

For example, it's commonly thought that your URL plays a role in how well your site ranks organically. So, people have come up with long URL's full of keywords, that haven't been shown to actually work. Maybe in an advertisement, if your URL was succinct it could lure a few extra clicks, but in the grand scheme of things, having an obnoxiously long URL will only hurt you, especially in the case of print advertising (signs!) where your audience is expected to type/text it in at some point!

A side note: having too many domains point to a site will reduce your placement rankings. Domains are strictly for direct marketing and very targeted marketing. It should be three words or less and if you can't remember it while driving by a sign at 30 MPH, then don't purchase it!

Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to sell you SEO magic. Apparently they know the secrets of a multi-national, multi-billion dollar entity. Heh.

However, this isn't a story of gloom and doom. Well, not entirely. Partially.

The supply of constantly updated and free information is what will consistently rank well with Google. That's why you often see blogs nearer the top of search results for many topics. I hesitate to say "Keywords" because it's really about context. You can try to target a set of keywords, but what does that entail exactly? What you should ask yourself, is what is the contextual relationship between the information on this page, and what keywords I am "targeting."

You can research this to death, and you'll not really find a lot of consistent information. However, you may decide that you're going to do it anyway. The main point that I am about to make, is that by and large the galactic amount of money you will spend trying to rank your own custom website, with no promise of immediate return, will make you feel sick.

If you were to take $20,000 and get a custom website with some SEO tricks thrown in, you must bring yourself to compare it with the results you would see had you invested that amount of money into direct advertising. And if you consider as well, that Google and Facebook are placing ads in the contextual sense, relative to the keywords you are marketing towards, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to forge your own path unless you're incredibly bored and have Mariana-tench-like pockets. Zillow gets hundreds of millions of hits and is constantly updating, can you realistically compete with that?

Not really. Investing any kind of money into such an endeavor is definitely a waste.

However, this brings us to the topic of SEM. SEM stands for search engine marketing, and Kunversion empowers you to dominate it.

For more information on the kinds of results you could experience with SEM, see our presentation from the inPower Digital Summit, here

All of the tools in Kunversion allow you to master SEM in a way to rapidly grow your sphere. Think of it like this. The amount of damage you can do to your wallet chasing SEO would be immense. If you took that $20,000 that we mentioned earlier for no guarantee of results within even a year, you could grab around 3,300 leads from Facebook in very well under a year.

This is what we do. And we're always driven by the results. All of the really good tools we have for SEM we put a lot of development time into, to ensure that you have the option to control how well or how rapidly your sphere can grow. You might notice that things such as blogging and other SEO tools, they're not as good as the SEM tools, because the SEM tools bring the results that our most successful clients use to form the foundations of their presence online. You can do the same.