We Don't Need No Stinking SEO ... or do we?

All of you who have your own website, struggle from time to time with 'organic' key word/phrase placements, as I do. There's loads of good information out on the Internet on how to get your website to rank high on Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL, etc. and not in position 45,487 on page 28,942 on this or that search - the location we've all been in at one time or another. What the guru's don't happen to mention to you and I, is that our residential real esate mortgage lending industry is a very difficult one to get a first page ranking on.

I myself set out to develop a retail residential real estate mortgage brokerage website, attract applicants exclusively via the net, and get them closed all through the 21st Century technology, the Internet and my website back in 1999. Over the 39 months I created and fine tuned it, I talked about it daily, inside the Mortgage Grapevine industry discussion board many thousands of time, both the successes and the failures as they unfolded - then stopped operations and 5 years ago began teaching a live class to show others how - that's how and when the Secret! University mortgage training center began (just a small bit of historical context).

With that accomplishment under my belt, and remaining anal about statistics from my early days with The Mother Company. I changed over the website to the one you all see today - a learning center with a wide variety of venues for potential students to choose from.

I've become a student of SEO -- -today I wanted to share some of our recent results with several different search engines - this info came from my daily study of our web visitor statistics (which I sort inside an excel spreadsheet):

Google Search
mortgage broker mentor #1
mortgage finance certification courses #1
mortgage instruction #1
mortgage training master #1 and #2
certified mortgage professional #2
residential real estate mortgage lessons #1
mortgage industry publications #1
step by step mortgage lesson #1 and #2
mortgage professional mentor #1 and #2
certified mortgage banker #1
certified mortgage certifications #2
mortgage lessons #1 and #2
cmp certified mortgage planner university #1 and #2
requirements for cmp designation #1

Yahoo Search
mortgage professional training #1
mortgage officer lessons #1
ceritified mortgage professional #2
loan originarator training center #2
looking for a mentor loan officer mortgage industry #1
mortgage lesson #1

MSN/Live Search
best mortgage originator mentoring #2 and #3
certified mortgage professional #1
certification mortgage professionals #2

AOL Search
mortgage lessons #1 and #2

What I find interesting about these random entries above, is how similiar the words/phrases seems to be and yet ranking different from one search engine to the next. Although I am quite proud of how well we rank on these and other key word/phrases, etc. I wanted it point out that it is my opinion that even though 'placement' is indeed an exact science, and I don't know what it is yet ... so if you're having difficulty ... join the party!