After a year on posting about the First Page of Google, I still am being asked this question on a weekly basis.

From a real estate agent's perspective, they want to show up first. Showing up first in their searches means everything to them. It's like the company who wants to increase the LIKES on their FACEBOOK page but ignores sales. This strange to me but seems to be people's mindset nowadays.

What's even stranger is their strong desire to accomplish this. They are willing to spend almost any amount of budget to make this happen.

They feel that if they in the first position in google, that their sales will increase as well.

I, on the other hand, find very little truth to this. Some of the web sites our company pushes out are quickly the dominate position for google searches. The number of times this position leads to actual sales is little in comparision to what real life interaction does.

And I very well could be wrong.

Nonetheless, with the strong desire to become number one position, I'm finding most agents in the first position (not our clients mind you) are using INBOUND LINKS to help.

INBOUND LINKS are links from other web sites linking to your web site. So if Yahoo News does a report about us and posts a link to our web site, that is an inbound link. Get it? Good.

Two important factors come into play when discussing inbound links; the TITLE of the link and the NUBMER of links.

TITLE OF LINKS

The title of the link is simply something like JUPITER FL REAL ESTATE. The idea is that if you have the right words in the title of the link, it helps. So reference the JCPENNY article in the NYTIMES here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

NUMBER OF LINKS

One trick seems to be getting as many inbound links as possible. But you might ask where would these inbound links come from? Good question.

That is where social media comes into play. Basically any other web site that can refer to your web site is what we want.

Here is a quick list I came up with researching for a few moments from other agent's web sites:

• twitter
• facebook
• pintrest
• wordpress
• activerain
• zillow
• trulia
• other private web sites
• vimeo
• youtube
• google+
• google-adwords
• own-blog
• ezinearticles
• articlebase

THE PROBLEM

The problem very naturally becomes that this takes time. And lots of it. If you know anything about real estate agents, most of them want the results but are not willing to put in the time to achieve the results. Maybe it goes back to their commission mindset.

In any event, they want the first spot but are not willing to put in the time to even post on their own web site let alone some else's web site. And doing it 15 times over is out of the question.

I posted the places here so I could keep track of what I see others doing. At some point, I may offer a service that does this but it will have to be pretty pricey to as the amount of time that is involved.

Until then, I have the list and I will play around with one web site to see if I can't get it to pop in a competitive google search to see if it works.