NEWS REALTORS ON THE NET DOING BUSINESS ON THE NET CREATING A WEBSITE
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The name "search engine" sounds very mechanical but, in reality, a search engine is a computer software application not far different from the applications on your own PC. For the top search engines the difference is the size and power of the computer that the engine is running on. Some of these engines are claiming to have indexed more than 50 million pages on the Web. Basically, the search engines send out what is referred to as a "spider". This is a program which finds and reads the content in Web Sites. The "spider" collects data from each Web Site and creates a summary of the contents of each site it visits. In the process the sites are "indexed" within the memory of the search engine computer. When someone does a search on the search engine the computer checks its' index and "matches" the search words with the words which have been indexed for each site. Those sites with matching words are then listed in the results. If your site is "rated" as being a match or close match it will appear high in the results. Professional Webmasters always try to assemble a web site so that it appears on Basically, the search engines send out what is referred to as a "spider". This is a program which finds and reads the content in Web Sites. The "spider" collects data from each Web Site and creates a summary of the contents of each site it visits. In the process the sites are "indexed" within the memory of the search engine computer. When someone does a search on the search engine the computer checks its' index and "matches" the search words with the words which have been indexed for each site. Those sites with matching words are then listed in the results. If your site is "rated" as being a match or close match it will appear high in the results. Professional Webmasters always try to assemble a web site so that it appears on the first or second page of the results. Maintaining the search engine positions requires constant attention and regular re-submissions. Occasional changes and additions are necessary to keep ahead of other sites.The Latest News 1/11 AOL will being introducing a new "AOLnetfind" within the next two months. Available only to users of the new 4.0 version, this new search engine will introduce new features. MSN search now has a submission page and is accepting URL submissions. This new portal is gaining in popularity and has become the source for considerable visitor traffic. Several months ago Yahoo switched its web search engine to HotBot from AltaVista. With Hotbot's conversion to the Inkotomi software and data base this has generated traffic for many websites who had not previously done well on Yahoo. News 10/6 AltaVista is the only major search engine that has not had a significant problem over the past six months. If you have been monitoring the position of your website pages on the engines you have probably seen pages (or your entire site) disappear from every search engine except AltaVista. In some cases the engines have recovered lost websites and in others it has been necessary to re-submit. AltaVista has just changed their format as of this past weekend. So far we have not heard of any problems. This engine has been very consistent in its performance, indexing and search results. Once indexed by AltaVista a page generally stays in roughly the same position for months. www.altavista.digital.com InfoSeek has struggled since June as it attempted to install its' new ESP system. In the process the page positions on the search results changed dramatically. As a results the search engine was buried with re-submissions and feel far behind in indexing pages. Whereas InfoSeek had been known for its' ability to index a page within hours, it now requires a day or more. It appears that this engine will have its problems solved and be caught up with its backlog by the end of October. www.infoseek.com Excite/AOLnetfind….and now Netscape are all served by this engine. There are several other affiliations with Excite that add to its market penetration. With all the growth they have been going through it has been difficult to get listed and they have regularly "lost" websites from their index. We see this as an on going problem with excite that may not be resolved until the end of the year. www.excite.com HotBot has gone through some major changes that have included new servers and a switch to the Inkotomi search engine. This engine is gradually improving but it has been very slow in indexing new submissions (typically 4 to six weeks). www.hotbot.com Lycos too is going through growing pains and was not indexing pages at all for a while. They say they have stored the submissions and will eventually index all of them. The most recent reports show that it has required up to two months for Lycos to index pages. www.lycos.com NorthernLight has begun to expand its data base and has been indexing websites throughout the web. Previously specializing in documents and books, this engine is now expanding into general categories. www.northernlight.com Different Categories 3/18 There are really two different animals in this field. There is the search engine which we have described and here is another type of site defined as a directory. AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Web Crawler and HotBot are search engines. Whereas a site such as Yahoo is considered directory. The directories utilize a more involved process in selecting and indexing the information they contain. Yahoo utilizes humans to read and index the sites. Because of this, Yahoo often gives better search results. Who is The Biggest and The Best? 3/18 Well, it is hard to really compare the engines. By pages indexed? As of last year Alta Vista claimed 100 million pages in their index. HotBot at 80 million and Excite at 55 million rank up there. InfoSeek (30), Lycos (30), Northern Light (30 to 50), and Web Crawler(2). But, we might also look at the quality of the matches returned and at other factors. It is really up to the individual user to determine which they like best. There are also lesser know specialty engines which only index certain types of information. Getting a good position on the search engine results 4/5 We are receiving calls and e-mails from Realtors about the performance of their web sites on the search engines. All ask why their sites or the major franchise sites are not up on page one or two of the search engines. There are many reasons. In designing a web site there is a whole list of do's and don'ts which affect search engine position. These cover things such as meta tags, keywords, page titles, content and hyper links. The major franchises do not appear because they are not key wording their sites for local area searches and are depending upon national advertising about their web sites to get readership. If you are trying to improve the position of your web site on the engines see our sections on page design and Key wording. [Page Design] [Key wording] AOLnetfind 4/5 4/5A number of people have asked about getting listed on the AOL search engine AOLnetfind. As with all other elements of AOL, the search engine appears to be overloaded and it takes six to eight weeks to get indexed by their spider. This engine is powered by the Excite search engine and Excite is in the process of re-designing their system so things have been very slow there. Lycos Has New Look, other engines making changes 5/7 5/7Lycos has installed new software giving their home page a new look along with some new features. Many of the engines are now offering more services including e-mail and personal home pages. It is rumored that the new Excite/AOL search engine will have some kind of involvement with Netscape Navigator. The term "keywords" refers to the words and phrases implanted in a web site for the benefit of the search engines. The engines record these words and phrases as a part of indexing your web site. The latest piece of news in this arena is the use of the word realestate. That's right, real estate spelt incorrectly. Many do spell it this way and the engines are indexing under this spelling. Keywords are commonly placed in "meta" tags on the HTML source page. There are two critical meta tags for the search engines. These are the "description" tag and the "keyword" tag. The description tag provides a description of the page contents (subject) and is often used by the engines as the summary that will provide on their results page. Giving serious thought to this tag can be very beneficial considering that the summary may make the difference as to whether or not a searcher visits your site. But, limit it to a maximum of 250 characters. The keyword tag should also be limited to 250 characters but here you just want to put in a list of keywords and phrases. They should be separated by comma's. The most important keywords should be repeated several times (no more than 4 times) and should be separated from each other by other keywords. Here is how the Meta Tag line should look..... <meta name="description" content="put description here"> .......... the keyword line is the same but says keyword instead of description. These must be place between the header delineators <head> </head> If you are reading this News Letter in a browser you may be able to look at the underlying source page and see what I mean. Look under the Browsers "View" menu for "source page", "source" or other identifier. Be careful with your key wording. Too much and the engines will penalize you. DO NOT use text the same color as the background. Most of the engines are wise to this and will not list your page at all. Now, this News Letter addresses the Real Estate industry so let's talk about real estate keywords. The most commonly used keyword is "Real Estate". Our research has shown that for major metropolitan areas the search engines have up to 1400 pages indexed. Here we are talking about a keyword phrase like "Chicago real estate". Yes you will get several million page if you just put in Chicago real estate.... but if you use the search phrase "Chicago real estate" in quotes the search engines will only give you pages that have that exact phrase. On the other hand, you can type in Chicago+real+estate and you will get pages that have each of those words but not necessarily combined in a phrase. Regardless of how you might do it, for Chicago you are going to get a lot of pages. Scary huh? Well, it isn't that bad. A recent study showed that only 31% of the commercial web sites use meta tags. It can then be assumed that they are also not otherwise specially laid out for search engine indexing so we only have to compete with 31% of the 1400 pages. Gets better, see. Now some search engines like Excite (AOLnetfind) , do not read these meta tags. These engines read only what is seen by the public. So, how do we "keyword" pages for these engines...... Tricky Dicky will explain...Says Dick, first you must place the words near the top of the page....so, search engines don't read Graphics but, they do read the alternative text that is placed with the graphic for those who choose to browse sites without downloading graphics. This is the "ALT" tag that follows the description of the graphic in the HTML code. HTML publishing software typically places the file name and size in this space. But, you can delete that description and put your keywords there. That's why we often have a graphic near the top of a page so we can place the keywords there. Of course it helps if you put text at or near the top of the page too. More about keywords next week. How about page titles? If you are a Realtor and your page title is "Bob Jones' Home Page" do you think the engines will be impressed by that? ...LOL (Lots Of Laughter) right.... Much better to say... "Chicago Real Estate and Homes for sale".... that will make an impression on the engines and earn you a higher position.
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here to order report] More Keywording Tricks……6/21 When setting up your keyword meta tag, pick two or three critical phrases. For example, for the keyword "chicago" put in phrases like , chicago real estate, chicago realtor, chicago homes for sale, separate the phases with commas and a space…. The search engines will pick these up as phrases and give you a high rating when a searcher uses a phrase that matches yours. Also use the miss spelling of realestate (one word) as many people spell it that way. The challenge now is to come up with top page (the visible page) content that includes these phrases. For the engines that do not read meta tags you must place these key phrases in your page content. Checking Your Search Engine Position...7/2 To check your position in the search engine results you input the keywords and phrases that you set up on your page. Here's the tricky part…… Check each phrase three different ways. Depending upon the sophistication of your searcher, he may put quotes around the phrase, use the "+" sign between words or just enter it without syntax. You will find that your page has a different position under each approach. It may not show up under one and yet give you a high position under another. Stay tuned for more on this important element...
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