There you go again….the seller is waiting impatiently at home for you to present your buyer’s offer that you’re hurriedly writing up, and you can’t remember how to spell “obfuscate” which your buyer insists must be in the offer because….well, who cares why? He just wants to make a point about something…but you can’t find the office dictionary. If only you knew how to find basic things like this on the Web.
Below you’ll find Web site links to data that can be most valuable to you in preparing documents and in your general realty marketing work.
You might want to save these below links or make this entire column a “Favorite” in your browser under a folder name called “Shortcuts.”
Or, make a different and perhaps more useful kind of “favorite” that we’ll show you how to make. Meanwhile, here are some useful sites that will save you time and money on the web.
- Look up Internet terms - Webopedia.com
- Look up definitions - Dictionary.com, or M-w.com
- Use a thesaurus - Thesaurus.com
- Optimize Web images - Gifwizard.com
- Analyze your Web site - Netmechanic.com
- Find your state’s department of real estate - Search Realtor.com for associations, or search engines for “(YourStateName) Department of Real Estate”
or “(YourStateName) Board of Real Estate”
- See which agents dominate on the Web in your city - Google.com. Search by your "(city name) real estate."
- Learn which realty-related key words are searched for most often in your city - Goto.com. Then, search for the name of your city: Cleveland, Seattle, Detroit, San Jose, etc.
In April, 2001, “Cleveland real estate” was searched for 728 times on www.goto.com. “Los Angeles real estate” was searched for 1604 times. “Detroit real estate” was searched for there 427 times. Even though goto.com is only a fraction the size of Yahoo!, you’ll still gain a valid sample indicative of all web searchers. Once you know, you can be sure of what key words to emphasize in your web site and Meta tags.
Also, search using your city’s name along with other realty terms such as realty, Realtor®, Realtors®, homes, condos, houses, relocation, etc. to see which phrases, in your town, are most often used.
Published: June 20, 2001
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, 