You can make your web site get more visitors by knowing what key words people enter into search engines to find sites like yours. For example, the majority of people search for real estate-related sites using key word phrases that include the name of the county, or city, with "real estate" such as in "Orange County Real Estate" or "Santa Ana Real Estate."

But what are the secondary key words people use, and the third most often phrase used by consumers searching for realty-related info in your marketing area? And why are these key words so important to know, anyway?

They’re important to know because if you do not have them included in your site the search engines will not deliver YOUR site to people seeking realty sources in your marketing area. For example, the success of your META tags on your web site depends heavily on WHAT key words are included in them. And usually, what key words are actually visible on the same page, too.

(What are META tags? To see some, go to the top of your browser and click on VIEW. Then, in the drop-down menu, click on SOURCE. What you see is the underlying code for the web page. The codes between (HEAD) and (/HEAD) that begin with META are the META tags. In essence, they are terse summaries of your site’s content. Most search engines read these as well as visible words on the web page, to rank that page’s relevance to key words being searched for. Each word in a META tag is critical as is the ORDER in which the key words appear. The most important key words of all are in the title because most search engines rank title-words highest. See great web info sites at end of this article.

Thus, your META tags and visible text on your site must include the key words that MOST consumers use when searching for realty-related info in your area. If these key words are not included, your site will never appear even in the first 10 pages of search engine results that are delivered to consumers. And you want to be on page one. If you ever wondered why your web page never comes up in search engines----now you know.

To find out what key words your web pages should include, visit the search engine GoTo.com. Enter in some key words that you suspect people use to find you in your city and GoTo.com will tell you how many people used that particular key word string in the past month.

Entering "santa ana real estate" shows that only seven people used that search string. Going broader in geographical region and entering "Orange County real estate" shows that 107 people used that string in the past month. Now you decide. Which key words would you rather have on your web page to match the ones that relate to your area? But don’t go too broad or you’ll get lost geographically. For example, the string "real estate" is too generic because it was searched for 67016 times on GoTo in October, 1999 and could lead to sites anywhere in the world. You’re better off with key words that point to your area.

Remember, too, that GoTo.com is a relatively new search engine with only a fraction of the searches that, say, Yahoo! gets. So if GoTo gets seven people searching for "Santa Ana real estate," Yahoo! might get 4000 or more in one month. Thus you would WANT your key words to include "Santa Ana" IF you marketed in Santa Ana, California. Or how about having one page of content with key words tailored for "Santa Ana real estate" and another page of content tailored to "Orange County real estate?" Ahah, now THAT is the best solution of all.

On AOL, people have been able to find info for years by simply entering in the relevant keyword. And some new sites now let you fetch info solely from key word searches, such as at Keyword.com. Go there and enter your city or county and see who comes up. You can even register your own keyword for your marketing area while you’re there. (Be sure to read the rules)

Another valuable place to cause your site to be linked to keywords is at RealNames.com. It costs $100/year, but on the Alta Vista search engine your site will be included in a list accessed from a link saying a "Click here for a list of Internet Keywords related to (yourkeyword)." But only when your choice of certain key words has been searched for by a consumer.

The RealNames link will also come up on searches made on the Go Network, MSN, and soon on other engines and web portals and even from the browser command line in the Internet Explorer 5.0 browser.

On most search engines you can also pay for your banner ad to appear when certain keyword strings are searched for, although usually your string is usually limited to only TWO words. The cost is high; often $35/thousand impressions, but remember, your banner ONLY appears when YOUR selected key words are used by a consumer. So this approach could provide fairly specific target marketing if your key words consist of the name of your city and perhaps the word "homes" or "realty" as in "Detroit realty."

To learn more about keyword usage in META tags, and to even create your own META tags, go to WebPromote.com, ScrubTheWeb.com, Hotwired/Webmonkey or Vancouver-Webpages.com. And to find out what ANY Internet-related term means, always visit Webopedia.

To market yourself through your web site, you or your web designer MUST know about keywords and META tags. Oddly, many designers of graphically excellent web sites do NOT have a clue about META tags and the proper key words to use in them, although most will tell you that they do. So shop around until you find someone who truly does know. And who has high-ranking sites to prove it. Otherwise your site will be just one more of the thousands of Realtor® sites that, yes, they are on the web, but, sadly, no one will ever find them due to lack of proper META tags and keywords.

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Published: January 4, 2000

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 .