There are many of us who really haven't spent time "surfing" and don't have the hours to spend learning all about this new thing called the Internet.  This article is meant to provide a quick education and includes information that the average internet surfer does not pick up.   If you are considering developing a web site or a home page for business purposes the following will provide an insight which is invaluable in making the decisions you face.

To access the Internet one must have a computer with a modem, an internet access provider (AOL Cybergate, MCI ) and a browser (software designed to navigate the Net).  Most access providers give you a browser.  Once you are up on line you have access to the World Wide Web and can literally correspond with people all over the world instantaneously without incurring any expense other than a local phone call and your monthly access charge .  Typical access fees run $19.95 a month.

Assuming you have all the above, you now can now participate in almost all Internet activities.  In the process you will acquire an e-mail address which allows others to send you mail.  There are many different things which you can become involved with but, in this article, we will limit ourselves to subjects related to "doing business" on the web.

WEB SITES AND HOME PAGES

Most of us have been offered free home pages and have had offers of inexpensive web sites.  Be very careful with these offers.  If you want to have exposure on the Internet and attract visitors you must be up on the search engines and have links from other sites.  Many of these free pages and web sites don't give you that exposure. 

If you are planning a serious effort to develop business activity on the web there are a number of things you must be aware of.  Putting up a basic web site is literally easy if you have ever worked with desk top publishing software.   With the templates and standard elements that are available you can create a nice looking site.  Many middle schoolers and High school students can do it.  Just ask your children.  But, if your site is going to attract visitors and earn a high position on the search engines, it must be laid out and designed to rank high on the engines.  This, the software cannot do for you. 

Unfortunately there are many supposed professionals who do not know about things like meta tags, keywording, content relevancy and the like.  A properly set up page may have as many as 200 to 300 combinations of keywords.  It is these elements that put your pages up on page one of the search engines.  We have had many E-Mails from Realtors who have web sites that are not on the search engines.  In some cases they have spent more than a thousand dollars to have these sites done by "professionals" only to find out that they were not done correctly and were never submitted to the search engines.  More on this subject follows.

BROWSERS

Browsers are the software applications that allow you to "browse" the Internet.  The most popular are Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator.  Included on the browsers are the popular search engines.  Browsers also offer other services and connections to various sites such as directories like Yahoo.  A "surfer" uses a browser to surf the net often employing the search engines to find sites he wants to visit.  An avid golfer might search for sites having to do with golf.  As a person who enjoys fishing might search for sites related to fishing.

THE SEARCH ENGINES

Approximately 95% of the market is covered by five search engines and their affiliates.  AltaVista (Yahoo), Excite (AOL, Webcrawler, Megellan), Lycos, HotBot and Infoseek (Snap!, Search.com).  While the appearances vary, each of these are sites whose purpose is to provide access to other world wide web sites.  They each contain an index of pages from web sites all over the world.  Some of these engines claim to have indexed more than 50 million pages.   

One "searches" these indexes for the information one wants.   In the case of the real estate industry, a searcher might use "keywords" such as "real estate chicago" to search for real estate in the Chicago area.   Staying with Chicago for a moment, this searcher might also use the following keywords: homes for sale in Chicago, Realtors in Chicago, homes in Chicago, houses in Chicago, real estate agents in Chicago and so on.  A web site (page) must be "keyworded" with meta tags matching these. 

The keywords should also appear on the page that the public reads.  The search engine picks up these keywords from a page and indexes that page under those words (or phrases).  A successful web site or home page manages to earn positions on the first three pages of the search results for most of the keywords pertaining to its area.

A knowledge of this keywording process and a knowledge of the individual market areas is necessary for a web site designer to properly develop a successful site.  He or she must research the locality of the site in order to see what the competition has done on the Internet.  In addition he must know the area (geographically) cities and towns which the Realtor covers in order to properly keyword a page.

Once a web site or home page is ready to go the first step is to submit it to the search engines.  Don't be taken in by the offers to submit your site to 400 search engines for $60 or what ever.  A real estate web site need only be submitted to five search engines and this should be done manually.  Several of the top engines do not accept the automated submissions.   Depending on the engine, it requires a day to several weeks for the engine to index the site.  Some of the engines require that you submit each page independently.   Others ask that you only submit the top most page and claim their "robot" will index the entire site.  It can take three months for an entire site to be indexed.  Even then, sometimes the robot does not read all the pages.  So this process needs to be monitored and often the site has to be re-submitted. 

Once all the pages are up a good web master will make minor changes to drive it higher in the results.  An experienced  web master has software that will produce a report on the search engine positions of your site.  These reports literally tell you on which page of the results your site appears and they give you the relative position number in the results (position number 15 being fifteen from the top).  Many sites can produce visitor reports and "logs" which show you details of the activity on your site. Check with the company that hosts the web site.

DEVELOPING A WEB SITE OR A HOME PAGE

The first decision one makes when planning a web site or home page is whether or not to do it yourself.  There are many Do-It-Yourself projects on the net and only the most devoted computer hackers have produced successful business web sites.  Their success is a result of 100's of hours spent accumulating a knowledge and experience equivilant to that of a Web Master.   The least expensive approach to building a productive site or page is to have the assistance of an expert.  Not all Web Masters will make themselves available in this way but, if you can find one, he can give you instructions and reveiw your work providing helpful criticism.  Otherwise, you are best off paying the price to have a site or page done by a professional.  But, be careful, becuase many who present themselves as pros don't know what they don't know.  Given the knowledge you gain from this article you stand a better chance of evaluating a prospective web site designer.  Always ask for the specificics off what they do for you. 

We have found highly recomended web site developers who have created many sites only to have it learned after a couple of years that they were not doing things like submitting to the search engines and using proper keywording.

What is the price?  You can expect to pay between $300 and $500 to have a small site or home page assembled, submitted to the engines and monitored till it is fully up on the engines.  If you have custom graphics created it will cost you more.  If you are building an office site with many pages, it can run much more.  If you get your own domain you will pay $ 70 (covering the first two years) for the domain name and then, starting in year three,  $35 a year to maintain it.  Monthly hosting on a good server will cost $25 per month.  You will also either have to buy an HTML editor and maintain the site yourself or pay someone to do it.  For a domain of your own with hosting and expert maintenance expect to pay $100 per month exclusive of charges to up load new listings and the like.  AOL has Prime Host which charges $99 a month and gives you very little but the tools (an HTML editor and web pubisher) to do it yourself. 

There are many web marketing professionals on the Internet.  Some of these companies or individuals are very good at what they do.  But, there are also many who are amatuers who do not have all the knowledge required to do the job.  A company that specializes in the real estate industry on the Internet and that is very experienced in promoting Realtors is Home Finders USA.  They have an established track record and can show you the results they have achieved.  Because they are organized for volume production of Realtor Home Pages their pricing is very low.  Check them out if you are considering have a web site done or a Home Page.

Published: June 8, 1998

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