Real Estate Agents ask me all the time why their site is not getting any hits or inquiries. That’s when I find out that they do not have it registered or “advertised” anywhere. It’s very hard for people to find you if you don’t let them know where you are. There are simple ways to do this.

Advertising Your Site

First of all, put your web address everywhere that you have your name. It’s that simple. It seems that agents forget to put it on the most fundamental of marketing pieces such as their business cards. Another place that your name is recognized everyday is your For Sale sign—your web address should be there as well. How about your voice mail? It’s the perfect place to say, “see my latest listings on www.yoursite.com, and please leave your name, phone number and email address, I’ll call when I return to the office.”

Any and all marketing pieces, including newspaper and magazine advertising, should have your web address on them. You will not get any traffic to your site if you don’t let people know you have a site. Simple.

Register in Search Engines

When you log on to the Internet with whatever service you use, you are on a search engine, it could be Yahoo, InfoSeek, Lycos, MSN, Alta Vista, Google, etc. You are using one to find a particular service, person, or product. Normally, the consumer does not jump from search engine to search engine when they cannot find what they are looking for—what they do is revise the key words for the search. Knowing that people use different search engines and don’t go from one to one very much, you need to be in all the search engines. How do you do that? It’s easy. Use a company to register you. There are many out there, I use WorldSubmit.com. There is a nominal fee involved, but well worth it when your name and site come up all the time.

Make a note. If your site in just one big advertisement about yourself, the human evaluators of the search engine may not feel that you have anything to offer consumers and therefore will not recognize it and add it to their directory. You need to have content of value for the consumers—school links, property listings, dining information, area information, etc. When you have lots of good content, you have a much better chance of having your site be one recommended by the search engines.

Register on other sites

There are many sites where you should be registered as well. These sites advertise to bring consumers to them and you can “piggyback” on this advertising by having your name and site registered with them as well. Some are free and some involve fees.

The most visited real estate site on the Internet is still Realtor.com so please register with them. You should also be registered in Realty Times < a href=http://www.realtytimes.com/rtpages/agentlocator.htm>agent directory. They provide information to many consumer publications on real estate. This will involve a fee, but well worth it. You want to be registered where the consumers go for information. Several free registrations include, Iown.com, HomeAdvisor.com>HomeAdvisor.com, Homeseekers.com, Selling Power, for commercial agents there is also Loopnet.com and Property.com.

Go the next step

Now that you have a web site, make sure that you have it registered everywhere you can. This is the next step in making it pay you big dividends. When you are thinking about your business plan for this year, plan to make this your year to get your site in the minds of the consumers in a big way. Register everywhere!

Published: February 7, 2001

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