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 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.

Frequently used search engines today are Excite, (which also operates the search engine for AOL) Hotbot, and Yahoo. Others include Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler, Magellan, Metacrawler, Go.com 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 something 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. The Orange County Association of REALTOR's web site is at: http://www.ocar.org. The site of HomeSeekers is: http://homeseekers.com.

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.

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Published: May 27, 1999

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .