You could write a book about getting sites to show up in the search engines and then they could change their algorithms and your book wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on.

The facts:

• Google absolutely dominates searches on the web (right now, Yahoo and AOL use Google).
• Revision - Yahoo doesn't use Google anymore and Google is now down to something like 59% of searches
• There are a lot of sites competing for placement on any given search.
• There is no trick to submitting to Google and getting indexed.
• There are lots of tricks to getting high ranking and good placement.
• Google doesn't like to be tricked and changes it's secret rules to deal with tricksters.

Some Background:

• Keywords: The terms people search for.
• Page Rank: A 0-10 ranking Google gives that is independent of keywords.
• Placement: Where your site actually shows up in the results of a specific search.
• Back Links: Links from other websites to your website.
• Optimization: Working with the content of your site to improve placement for certain keywords.
• Submission: Telling Google (or other search engine) that your site exists.

The basic idea is that Google ranks your site based on the number and quality of back links and then combines that info with the relavancy of the content of your site relative to the search terms in order to determine your site's placement. The more complicated reality is that there are lots of hidden factors which determine what they consider relavent and what determines rank. There are penalities for what they consider spam. For instance, overuse of keywords can damage your placement. There are also situations in which certain links to your site or from your site can cause penalties.

What is a search engine optimizer to do?

Rank is generally determined by the quality and quantity of back links. At myRealtyPage we link to you and submit your site to a number of free directories. We will submit to paid directories for you if you pay the fee. We have some other link sharing programs that you may participate in if you wish. We will help you setup links to your site from your company website or any other site that will agree to do it.

We will help you choose your keywords. You will need to participate in this because you know what areas you work in and what properties or programs you work with. It is necessary to be specific because, frankly, you are very very unlikely to place in general searches like 'real estate'. Given the keywords you are interested in, we will help you optimize your site by including these words in your title, content, and meta tags without over-doing it.

We will, of course, submit your site to many search engines including Google. Don't be fooled by people who make a big deal about either frequent submission or submission to 100's or 1000's of search engines. Frequent submission can hurt your placement, and there are not 100's of useful search engines for any particular category.

How do I get the right people to find my site?

That is a good question. If you select broad keywords like 'real estate' and get even moderate placement you may get more traffic than with a narrower set of keywords, but it might not be useful traffic. If you are selling real estate in California and someone in Iceland looking for a real estate lawyer visits your site it won't do you any good. The problem is to maximize the business your site generates and so you need to maximize the traffic from likely clients.

It is still difficult to determine how narrow a search you want. Given the choice between placing, say, around 15th when people search for homes in any of the 5 cities you serve or placing 3rd in one of them, but not placing at all in the others you will probably get more traffic by placing high on a search that is more narrow than your business. You might even want to focus on keywords for a particular neighborhood and get easy placement, but you should watch out because there may be 100 neighborhoods with the same name in the country. In general, I would recommend putting yourself in the head of your most likely client and estimating what they will be typing into a search engine. Then you might visit a site like Overture.com and get some data about searches for those keywords.

Once you have selected your keywords they should be placed in several places. HTML has a something called 'meta tags' which are viewable to a search engine (or to anyone who selects view->source from the browser) and can have fields such as 'keywords' and 'description' that help search engines match up searches to your site. The title of your site is another place that search engines will check to see if it matches with the search. And the keywords must also be present on the visible portion of your website.

Another possible thing to do with your keywords is to put them in your links. In HTML, a link has some stuff that is not seen that tells the browser which web site to load when a user clicks on the link and it also has the visible part that the user sees. The visible part can say anything you want it to say and if it includes your keywords it may help with search engine placement for those keywords. In my experience this has actually been an extremely important method for getting good placement on Google, but it may possibly, in some cases, be considered spamming and may hurt placement. It may be best to have links to your site which contain your keywords, but not to have all of them say the same thing and have some of them not contain the keywords at all. Of course, you don't always have control of what the links to your site look like, but when you do you should keep keywords in mind.

If you have more questions or want help picking your keywords please contact customer service and we will be glad to help.