Titles are designed to attract attention. I used the word "magic" in the title of this article on purpose to get your attention because most people think that getting a high search engine ranking requires some type of magic. The reality of the matter is that, like most other accomplishments, attaining a high ranking is a matter of proper planning, organization, testing, and refining. I don't believe anyone can attain a top ten ranking in all the major search engines simultaneously because the different search engines use slightly different methods in indexing web sites. But with a little tweaking, almost any site can get higher overall rankings and a top ten ranking in some of the listings.

First let's define which search engines we are looking to be listed with. These Search Engines will bring you over 95% of your search engine traffic. They are: AltaVista, AOL Netfind, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light Search, and Webcrawler. In my opinion it isn't worth the effort to try to keep up with the hundreds of other search engines. You see the ads that say "list your site with 500 search engines for $29.95". Well you are better off keeping your money and manually submitting your site to the search engines I listed. Notice that I did not include Yahoo in the list. That's because Yahoo is not a search engine, but a directory. Yahoo is very important in directing traffic to your site and I will include a paragraph at the end of this article with helpful tips about submitting your site to Yahoo.

You should start thinking about search engine placement before you design your site. The most important item that a search engine extracts from your page is the page title. If you are a real estate appraiser you should have "real estate appraisal" as part of the title as well as your firm name. I have noticed that some appraisers just put their firm's name or their name as the title and it might read something like "Joe Doe Appraisal Company". Well if someone specifically enters "Joe Doe Appraisal" into the search engine search box then more than likely the Joe Doe site will turn up in the results, usually near the top. But if they already know you they won't be searching for you will they? What we are looking to do is to drive new potential customers to your web site. Another thing that should be in your title is the general area where your firm does appraisals. Why? Because more than likely someone is searching for an appraiser for a specific area, and in addition to "real estate appraisal" they will enter "Los Angeles" or "Atlanta" or "Dallas" because that's where the property is that they want appraised. If you don't have your area in your title then all those sites that do have the area in their title will be listed before your site and it is likely to push you way down the list where your site won't get a chance to be seen. So if you are Joe Doe Appraisal Company in Miami, you title should read something like "Miami area real estate appraisal - Joe Doe Appraisal Company". That way your potential customer will find your site if they are searching for a real estate appraisal in the Miami area and if they do by chance already know your name they will get your site also.

After your page title the next most important item that search engines consider is your page content. Search engines index the visible text on your site and come up with a list of "keywords". More importance is placed on the text nearer to the top of your page so you should make sure that your key points and words such as "real estate appraisal" your coverage area, and anything else you consider important is used often (in readable sentences of course) near the beginning of your page. I don't mean necessarily near the beginning of your page as it looks on your screen but the beginning of your page as a search engine will read it. What's the difference? Tables. A search engine reads down the page as it looks when you display your page's raw HTML code in a text editor such as Windows Notepad. Since most pages use tables to properly format the page you should have your keyword rich material in the table cell (or column when you are looking at it with your web browser) on the left side of your page. That is because when a search engine reads down your page it will read all the way to the end of the left column before it starts on the right column, just at appears when you are viewing the HTML code with Notepad.

Now at the beginning I said that different search engines use different methods to index and rank sites. The information presented so far is pretty much used by all the search engines, it's from here forward that they differ in ranking methods, and this is one thing that could cause your page to have a high ranking with one search engine and a much lower ranking with another. In addition to the page title and page content some search engines place some weight on the META tags for "description" and "keywords". META tags are special HTML tags inside the "head" section of your web page that control certain things about web pages. This information is not displayed on the screen in your web browser but used by browsers, and search engines for certain functions. The META tag "description" is where you write a short 1 or 2 sentence description of your site. You should use your keywords in a phrase early in this tag because some search engines place weight on this. For example your META tag description tag might read:

<META name="description" content="Miami area real estate appraisal by Joe Doe Appraisal Company. Full service residential real estate appraisal firm.">

This description will be used by most if not all of the search engines to tell about your site when it shows up in the search results. 

Another META tag that should be used is "keywords". This is where most people think the magic is in search engine placement and they are mistaken. Most search engines don't give any weight to this tag and the ones that do only give a little weight to it and some only use it when there is no or little content to your page such as when you have a large graphic and little or no text. Nevertheless you should use it and list a few keywords. I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to think of obscure keywords, just use the ones people will search for. The following is an example of the "keywords" meta tag code:

<META name="keywords" content="real estate appraisal, real estate appraiser, appraisal, appraiser, Miami, residential, certified, Joe Doe Appraisal.">

This will cover about all you need, and adding hundreds of key words only serves to lessen the importance of the ones that you use. Stick with the important ones.

Another thing that some search engines use and some don't is the "ALT" text in your graphics tags. The purpose of the "ALT" text is to show some text that describes the graphic in case the viewer is looking at your site with a "text only" browser. Some people still do and also some people use the "turn off graphics" options in their browser to make surfing the Internet much faster. So you can use the "ALT" text feature to your advantage. For example if you have your firm's logo at the top of your page you can use the following tag:

<IMG SRC="logo.gif" width=250 height=100 ALT="Real Estate Appraisal - Joe Doe Appraisal Co. Logo">

You have gotten the words "real estate appraisal" in there one more time for the search engines that index this ALT text (bear in mind that most do not, but every little bit can help).

There are other things little things you can do but you reach a point of diminishing return where the effort expended isn't worth it. Now that I have given you some things to do, here are a few general "Don't", or things that will usually hurt your rankings.

Don't use frames. Most search engines have a hard time indexing sites with frames. You only hurt your chances when you use them. Anyway many people don't like frames and there is nothing you can do on your site with frames that can't be done with conventional methods.

Don't try to cheat. More than likely you won't get away with it and if caught the search engine will disallow all of your sites pages. For example don't load your page with repetition of key words with text that is the same color as your background color. This triggers an automatic lower ranking with most search engines. Don't use repetition of keywords in your META tags. Also don't use a META description or keyword tags that are not relevant to your site. This too will cause your site to be penalized.

Don't use the automatic submittal services. I know this might offend people that sell or give away these services but I have found that by individually manually submitting your site to each search engine your site will be indexed faster and not only that will be more assured of being indexed at all. I don't know why but the search engines give preference to individual submission rather than mass submission of sites.

Don't give up. Keep records of when you submit your site. If you check and your site is still not in a search engine after about a month resubmit. It also helps to read the guidelines and submission procedure at each search engine because they differ.

Okay I promised some tips early on about Yahoo. Yahoo is probably the largest director of traffic on the web. The big difference between Yahoo and the search engines is that to get listed in Yahoo a person has to look at your site, decide that the content is appropriate for the category you submitted it in, and then index your site. So do the following. Do a search in Yahoo for "real estate appraisal" and see what turns up. A lot of different categories will turn up. Select the category that is most relevant to your appraisal firm and follow the "suggest a site" instructions at the bottom of the page. A category such as "business, economy, real estate, appraisals" would be a place where almost ever appraisal firm should list their site. But don't stop there. You are allowed to list your site in more than one category if it is appropriate. List your site in the "regional" and "states" and "cities" or "metropolitan areas" categories. Not only will you probably be listed faster in these smaller categories, you will be more likely to get traffic that will want an appraiser in your location. Just remember that a human will be reviewing your submission and make sure you fill out the form correctly and choose the category that is relevant to your site.

Conclusion. Sometimes you will see someone's web site get a #1 ranking when the web designer used no planning whatsoever for search engine placement. If your site is high in the rankings already then don't mess with it. You have hit on the proper combination of text layout, title, and keyword density that is right for your page. But, if you're like most people that didn't plan for search engine placement and your page is near the bottom of the heap of the listings then by applying some of the suggestions above your web site will only go towards the top in the search engine rankings. 

Wayne McKerley, RWM.NET

This article is copyrighted 1999 by Wayne McKerley and may be reprinted in other electronic or print media as long as the following information is included in its entirety and unchanged at the bottom of the article.

"Wayne McKerley is the webmaster of RWM.NET a web site with the goal of helping real estate appraisers market their services over the Internet. Wayne offers FREE  information and services such as FREE web site design for appraisers as well as a other services related to Internet marketing of appraisal services. Visit Wayne's site at http://rwm.net and get your appraisal site off to a good start.  Wayne may be contacted via ."

Back to Tips and Articles Index