First Page of Google

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"The first page of Google" is a phrase that sickens me. For more than 10 years, I've been bombarded with so-called experts who promise this forbidden phrase as actual results in exchange for exorbitant payments. What's really crazy is that potential clients actually listen to them.

What we are talking about here is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The idea is simple, an outside company will perform some type of service on your, as in your possession, web site and you'll suddenly be the first result for the keywords you are targeting.

It's amazing how you can take someone and feed them such little information that they become so lost that they will listen to anyone who proposes a solution to them. One expert had the audacity to quote 250K to a real estate agent I used to work with. Their service was to do a bunch of amateur videos and post them on YouTube and embed them in the web site. I always said that if people really go for this, then I'm in the wrong business.

Another expert I came in contact with charged large sums of money on a monthly basis. Their service was nothing more than creating public profiles on every known source possible; Facebook, Twitter, Google+, FourSquare, LinkedIn, etc.

It isn't that these are bad actions. It's that the actions they are taking are something that anyone could do and they are price gouging for their services all the while spreading disinformation.

There is no First Page of Google

So in light of spreading accurate information, let's come to terms. First of all, there is no first page of Google. Google doesn't have pages the way a book or a magazine does. It's simply a search engine. You can liken it to a librarian at a massive library. You are asking the librarian for information on XYZ and she is bringing back results.

How the results get there

So how do the results get there? Well, for starters, there is no submission to Google per se. It isn't a matter of you submitting your web site to Google on a regular basis or else your site falls off the results, as I hear repeated incorrectly so many times on so many levels including professional levels.

The results get there because that what Google does. It searches the web. The name for this is "crawling" like a spider. In fact, they call them spider robots or spider bots or bots just for short.

There is no submission to Google. There is no formal document. There is no payment necessary. Google will do the work all by itself, without your help.

Showing up in the results

Showing up in the results isn't difficult. Let's say someone is searching for XYZ. In short, as long as you have a web site name that closely matches XYZ and the content on the web site is talking about XYZ, then the site should show up in the results somewhere.

The order of results

It's the order of the results that the librarian brings back that is important. This is probably what is meant by, "the first page of Google." So let's look at the order of results.

Google algorithm

The order of the results are determined by an algorithm or a fancy mathematical code. This algorithm is not a simple equation that you may have had in algebra class in high school. It has many parts to it, thousands of parts and is only known in full to a few people in the world and is locked up tightly. No one knows what the actual algorithm is but through history and through logic, people have been able to determine a few items that Google thinks is important.

Algorithm changes

Just when you think you have it nailed down, Google makes changes. How many? On average, about a change a day. So even if you were to conquer the Google algorithm in your own world, it wouldn't last very long. The brainiacs at Google make changes without warning, at their own will and sometimes the changes have significant impact on results.

Known factors

I could go on to list out the items that are known to make a significant impact but this blog is geared towards the average real estate agent and broker. The best way to do SEO is to not try and do SEO. Over the long run, this seems to be the best advice for the average agent. This advice is giving by people who used to work at Google and by industry experts.

In other words, they are trying to calculate something through mathmatics that can only be done by person, judging a web site for what it is. If you focus on creating a web site and making it useful, you will not have to focus on making sure your site is used.

You can focus on making your site usable by following Google's official guidelines here.

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