SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term that’s loosely thrown around by agents when they talk about their websites or blogs. It almost seems like a magical term, the way it’s described by people – as if, just by utilizing SEO on a website or blog, you will automatically land on the first or second pages of Google with a search for “Chicago real estate.”

That’d be great if it were that simple, but of course, it’s not. The truth about SEO is that it takes a lot of time to do right. It’s so much of a time investment, in fact, that people who are looking for quick SEO fixes often opt for shortcuts, like gray or black hat tricks (things like “stuffing” your page with keywords to rank higher, which ultimately get the website or blog penalized and blocked from Google altogether) or pay-per-click (PPC) ads (typically called search engine marketing, or SEM) that bring websites and blogs to the top of a Google page in the form of an ad.