| When you finally get your very own Internet
web page, guess what—even though having one puts you way ahead of most Realtors®,
you’re still only at the starting point of Internet marketing. However, in just one
hour, you can leapfrog yourself ahead of most other Realtors who have web pages today.
By itself, having a web page is like having a dollar bill.
Until you use if for something it’ll stay just a piece of paper. What makes a site (a
web "site" has multiple pages) valuable is linking it up properly with all the
major search engines, shopping malls and major "web entry" sites that people
routinely use to find a Realtor or a home in the city where they‘ll be buying or
selling.
The most frequently used search engines today are Excite,
(which also operates the search engine for AOL) Hotbot and Yahoo approximately in that
order. Lesser ones include Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler, Magellan, Metacrawler
and some 300 others. But since the ones mentioned above cover more than 90% of all search
engine traffic, don’t bother with the others.
You link your site to the search engines by going to each
one’s front page and looking for the words "Add URL" or similar. You click
on "Add URL" and you get a form that lets you, in effect, tell the search engine
that your site exists and where it’s located. But you’re also telling the engine
that when people search for sites with subject matter like yours, the search engine should
put the description of your site and address on the list of choices that is presented to
the searcher.
But wait. What’s an address for a web page look like?
Well, each page on the Internet has its own address, called a URL (Universal Resource
Locator). The big home and Realtor® search-site operated by NAR has this address:
http://www.realtor.com. OCAR’s nearly completed new site is at: http://www.ocar.org.
The 50-page web site of Debbie Ferrari is at http://www.debbieferrari.com. The one-page
site of Dennis and Sue Nespor is at http://homeseekers.com/oc/agent/SNESPSUE.htm.
For the most part, all that search engines do is match key
words that the searcher is looking for with the words you have on your web page or on its
hidden HTML code. For example, let’s say a buyer who’s relocating to San
Clemente from Chicago enters these words: "San Clemente California real estate".
The search engine would hunt millions of web pages and then deliver to the person perhaps
dozens of pages containing matches with those words—key words that you should already
have on your web page if you want search engines to find its address and display a
summary about the page’s content to the searcher. Note: Unless you add your URL to
these engines, your site has a far smaller chance of being presented to the searcher.
Which makes it almost worthless.
Adding your site to most search engines is as simple as
typing out the URL of your site into a blank space on the "Add URL" page,
perhaps also entering a 25-word description of your site, and then hitting
"enter" on your keyboard. Incredible as it seems, this simple activity will make
your web site 1,000 times more likely to be found.
Remember, getting a web page is only step one. The second
step is getting all the major search engines to know that it is there so that people can
find it. And best of all, you can add your site’s URL to all the major search engines
in less than one hour—perhaps the most valuable web marketing hour that you’ll
ever spend.
© William Koelzer, 1999 |
