Everyone wants to place well in the search engines. The top search search engines direct the lion's share of web traffic, so placing well in the search engines at any moment in time can increase your web site traffic substantially. Click-throughs on search engine results are often higher than other forms of promotion, such as untargeted banner advertising.

But, getting visitors to your site is the key to making your web investment pay off. Unfortunately, if you rely on search engines to make your web site successful, all you are left with is a never ending battle with:

a) An ever-increasing amount of other Realtor web sites
b) The search engines themselves

Realtor Sites Are Exploding

There is explosive growth in Realtor web sites, all wanting top positions on search engines in your area. Realtors use every trick in the book to come up on top, all derivatives of the infamous "AAA Auto Repair" trick to come up on top in the yellow pages. But not every business can start with an "A," much less three of them.

The reality is that every day a new Realtor web site comes on line in your area, displacing those that are already there, and every day existing Realtor web sites refine their "tricks," also displacing those that are already there. In other words, you are battling an army that keeps growing and one that is also growing smarter with an increasingly sophisticated bag of tricks.

Search Engine Placement is Fleeting

On another front, you must battle with the search engines themselves. Their "editiorial integrity" is on the line so they must have full-time software engineers whose only job is to make sure that all the tricks to come up on top don't work anymore. A trick that worked today probably won't work next week or next month. They constantly change what makes a site come up on top in the results.

Among the new technologies designed to completely defy all trickery are:

Click-through counters
"Direct Hit" as seen on Hot Bot measures how many people click on your link. You cannot control this.

Link popularity
Several other search engines sites are now using "link popularity", which measures how many other sites link to yours, and how popular those sites are. Again, you have very little control over this.

Proprietary Searches
The search engines are themselves directing web users away from traditional searches, by creating their own list of hand-picked web sites. Instead of keying in "my area - real estate", and clicking Search, the user simply clicks on the "Real Estate" link and gets a hand-picked list of web sites that the search engine company thinks are the best - or increasingly, that pay the search engine for placement there.

Paid Search Placement
Even if a user does a traditional search, many search engines now put their own (generally paid for) links at the top of the results list. For example, Excite puts their "Web Site Guide" links at the top of any search engine results that your web site might appear in. Infoseek puts two sections above any search results: "Recomended Links" and "Directory Topics". You have to scroll way down the page before you even see the section where your web site might appear.

All Search Engines Operate Differently
Last but not least, every search engine is different. A trick that works in one, probably won't work in another. You end up having to create different pages or even entire web sites for each search engine if you want to do well in all of them.

The penalty for trying to trick the search engines can be as severe as trying to fool Mother Nature - you can get blasted into oblivion. It's not smart to win the battle but lose the war. If search engines find you are tricking them in a way they don't like, they will remove your web site from their search engine entirely.

Why do some web sites do so well?

Yet, there are web sites that seem to do well at any moment in time, or over time. Why is that?

Well, a lot of it is just plain old luck. With search engines changing their selection criteria all the time, sooner or later a site will do well in some search engine, for some search phrase.

It is also hard work and long hours. One Search Engine Placement Company estimates that an individual would need to spend about 30 hours per week reviewing search engine results, and rebuilding their web site accordingly with new tricks to put them on top.

Some Realtors use the assistance of Search Engine Placement companies who have increasingly sophisticated technologies that are simply not available to the individual web site owner. These companies have large initial and ongoing investments to maintain.

How effective are search engine placement companies?

The inexpensive ones are mostly "Submit your web site to 400 search engines for $69" or similarly prices. The problem is most traffic is directed not by 400 sites but by a dozen. So how useful are these 400? For example, why be listed under "Joe's Top Web Sites?"

Most of these companies can't offer any guarantee as to how well you will do at all. So what is their real value?

The expensive ones tend to be very expensive and their guarantees are questionable. Some charge you from $.25 to as much as $2.00 per visitor! Others charge set up and monthly "maintenance" fees.

For example, one well known company charges $1500 up front and $500 per month. Their guarantee for this investment is "first page placement" on 2 of 15 (not even the top 7 or 8) search engines. Should you have confidence in this type of guarantee?

If you really examine it, isn't their obligation technically fulfilled when your web site earns "first page placement" on 2 search engines - one time only? Remember - your position in a search engine can and will change from one moment to the next. If this is true, then what about your position the rest of that day - not to mention the entire month? Is anything guaranteed beyond that one moment of success? Is this worth $7500 a year?

The bottom line is you'd better think twice about making the success of your web site dependent on search engine results. You can be on top one day and nowhere the next; you can be displaced by someone with better tricks than you, and you ultimately have no guarantee that the money you spend toward placement will have any results. And if they did, those results could be wiped out the next day. Happens all the time.

So how do I get traffic?

How can you reliably send visitors to your web site?

Published: February 9, 1999

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Editor's Note: This article reflects the opinions of Lawrence Schoeffler only and not necessarily the views of this or any other publication, organization or Website owner.