If you are a real estate agent with a personal web site, I know you've pulled your hair out about search engines. Every time you do a search, you aren't coming up as well as you want to. Or in every search engine you check, you get different results. Or it seems like some people (competitors!) come up better than you, and you can't understand why. Or one day you are doing great in a search engine - and then the next day or moment you are nowhere!

Even worse, emails constantly show up in your inbox telling you how "poorly" you are doing in the search engines, and how well you could be doing - if you only used the services of the company who sent you the email.

My company is responsible for marketing the personal web sites of close to 1000 top Realtors. One of the things we work on is search engine positioning. I have full time programmers working on this. We are constantly analyzing search engine results, reviewing reports from search engine research firms, and innovating new ways to propel our clients to the top of the search engines - legitimately, by the way.

I decided to write this series because there is so much confusion, and so many flat-out wrong opinions from "experts", about search engines, that I can't help myself. I'm going to try to not give away any trade secrets in this series of articles. But we'll see....

Search Engine Myth #1: Meta Tags Are Important

People talk about the importance of "Meta Tags" as if they are the Holy Grail of search engine success. They aren't. As a matter of fact, most search engines ignore them.

Yes, you heard me right. I know that Meta Tags is all everyone talks about. Even monolithic Microsoft (among others) has a web site that helps you generate the "correct" Meta Tags for your web site, on the premise that they are necessary for search engine success.

I'm sorry to burst any bubbles, but search engines by and large pay little or no attention to any of the key words placed in your Meta Tags. And this has been the case for quite a long time; years even. As a company we gave up on Meta Tags years ago: tweaking them never made any real difference for our clients.

Since the subject of Meta Tags seems to take on mythic importance in any discussion about search engines, it might be hard for you to believe what I am saying. I can understand this. Just follow my logic and I think you'll start to understand why it simply makes sense for search engines to ignore your key words in Meta Tags.

First, let me explain what a Meta Tag is: hidden text in the code of a web page. This hidden text can contain key words, a description, and other information about your web site. Since Meta Tags are hidden, people viewing your web site can't see them.

One of the original purposes of Meta Tags was to aid search engines in selecting the right web sites for people doing searches. So if someone entered, for example, "Phoenix luxury homes" in a search engine, and the key words within your Meta Tags were "Phoenix, luxury homes", the idea was that a search engine would know that your web site should be selected to come up.

It's a nice idea. But in reality it never worked too well. Why? Precisely because they are hidden from view, people immediately began abusing how they used Meta Tags. Countless unscrupulous webmasters would include within their Meta Tags all kinds of key words (like "Princess Di" and "super bowl") that had nothing to do with their web site, just to get more traffic. So, for example, an agent in Tucson could put "Phoenix" in her or his Meta Tags, and steal traffic from legitimate Phoenix real estate web sites.

The people who run search engines quickly got hip to this and began to tell their computers to ignore the key words in Meta Tags. Or at least to not pay much attention to them.

The general rule that we have discovered is that if it isn't visible on your web page, search engines will tend to ignore it. It's the only way they have of keeping people who are fighting for search engine success somewhat honest.

I'm not saying you shouldn't place your key words in a Meta Tag on your web site. Your webmaster should do this for you as a matter of course. It's pretty easy. It can't hurt. It might even help a bit - in some circumstances. In addition, you definitely want to have a Meta Tag with the description of your web site, as some search engines will display this when your site does come up in a search.

But if you think that cramming every key word you can think of into your Meta Tags is the secret to search engine success, or that somehow changing the order or placement of the key words within your Meta Tags will do it, you are going to be disappointed.

Published: April 27, 2000

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Lawrence Schoeffler is Vice President of Dominion Homes Web Services and founder of NUMBER1EXPERT. Dominion Homes Web Services includes Advanced Access, Agent Advantage by Homes.com, and Best Image Marketing, and is a division of Dominion Enterprises. Advanced Access is the industry leader in agent websites. More agents invest in an Advanced Access website than any other. Agent Advantage is the official agent website service of Homes.com, one of the most popular real estate portals in America. NUMBER1EXPERT by Best Image offers America's Top Performing Web Sites, with traffic and leads unequalled in the industry, sold exclusively to Top Selling Agents. Email Lawrence at .