Search Engine Tips

• RLS2000.com, Inc. is not responsible for your website to be listed on any search engine nor is it a service that RLS2000.com, Inc. provides.

•For more information on Search Engine services, please contact Fred Light.

• Take advantage of our advertising tips to also help drive traffic to your website.

Introduction

RLS2000.com, Inc. is happy to provide you with the following useful search engine tips. We encourage you to take advantage of them in order to improve your website’s chances of appearing on the major search engines.

Despite the rise in paid subscriptions offered by search engines, free search engine submission is still possible. However, using the paid programs offered will speed up the listing process and almost certainly generate more search engine related traffic for your website.

Given this, it is highly recommended that you understand how search engines work and why you may need to have a budget if you wish to have your pages ranked at or near the top of each search engine.

What Search Engines and/or Directories Should I Submit My Website To?

The first question should really be what are the major Search Engines and Directories? The top 5 search engines often comprise more than 95% of all traffic your website will receive from search engines. Below is a comprehensive list of the major players in the search engine scene.

Major Search Engines

1. Google - Often called the greatest search engine on the Internet, it is also the most popular according to recent Nielson/Net Ratings polls. This search engine is entirely free for primary listings and offers paid listings at the top of the search results, as well as their AdWords program which shows small text banners on the right hand side of the search results. Google bases its search results on website content as well as their patented PageRank algorithm, which factors in links from other websites to determining your rank in the search results. Your website should be in the index within a few months after you submit it.
   
   
2. Yahoo! - Second most popular, and probably the most famous of all search engines, this icon among web portals controls the search results on MSN.com, AltaVista.com, and Alltheweb.com in addition to its own search results. Submission is free. Paying to be in the directory is a good idea if you can afford the $300/year.
   
   
3. MSN.com - The third most popular search engine, MSN, does not currently provide its own search results. The results found on MSN are actually provided by Yahoo!, and you can be listed in MSN by submitting through Yahoo! at the link above. MSN does plan to offer their own search results in the future.
   
   
4. AOL - This popular search engine uses Google search results as its primary and paid listings. See Google.
   
   
5. AllTheWeb - Purchased by Yahoo!, this once promising search engine now uses Yahoo! results and will probably be used as a side project by Yahoo! for various purposes.
   
   
6. AltaVista - One of the oldest search engines on the Internet, AltaVista was showing its age until Yahoo! purchased it in 2004. It now uses Yahoo! results and is basically just another portal for Yahoo!.
   
   
7. Ask.com - The Teoma index powers both the popular Ask.com website and its sister site Teoma.com. You can only get into this index through being found by the Teoma Crawler.
   
   

How to be Listed Fast and Near the Top

Often, those who launch new websites want to appear in search engines right away and/or ranked near the top. In these cases, you'll need to budget more money. By paying an inclusion fee to some of the crawler-based search engines mentioned above, you can shorten the usual several month delay of appearing to only a few days.

Yahoo! is different from the other search engines in some very important ways that make it hard to get your site listed. Yahoo! isn't really a search engine - it's a Web directory. A real live human reviews every submission to Yahoo! That's different from search engines like AltaVista or Google, where your site is automatically spidered, indexed, and added to their search database without any human involvement.

It can take your site several months to be listed on Yahoo! The reason for this time lag is simple: Yahoo's editors are swamped with submissions every single day. Since Yahoo is the most popular search engine, and one of the most popular sites on the Web, it receives thousands of submissions a day. The chances of your site getting noticed aren't good.

However, Yahoo does offer an option that can improve your chance of getting noticed - at least, if you're willing to pay for it. Yahoo Express service guarantees that your site will be reviewed within seven days of submission. The service costs $299 per year.

• How to add your site using Yahoo Express

Why am I not listed when I search Google.com?

The absolute best way to get listed with Google is to build links to your web site. This is the best way to get listed for free with all the major crawlers listed on this page. Crawlers follow links, so if you have good links pointing at your web site, the crawlers are more likely to find and include your pages. What does this mean? The more you have your site linked on other pages, the more chances you have your website to appear on their engine.

If you have a brand new website, it will probably take several months before Google lists your web pages. Because of this, you might consider making use of its paid placement program.

• How to add your site to Google

Meta Tags and Keywords

Meta tags or keywords are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy.

How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tags. The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don't appear on the page itself.

As an agent or office, you are able to enter in your keywords for your web site through the Update page, the link for which is located at the bottom of your web site. After entering your Username and Password, you will see the update page of MLS Property Finder.

Within this page, click the Site Promotion link. This is where you enter your Title, Description and Keywords. Enter in as many keywords as possible (up to 1,000 characters) in order to take full advantage of the crawler-based search engines. Within this page as well, you will find several search engine links on the right-hand column to where you can submit your web site.

If you have an RLS2000.com website, your keywords will be hidden at the bottom of every page. These keywords are pulled from the database where you enter the information as explained in the above paragraph. Google and many other search engines pick up these keywords, since they are listed on your actual website.

In Conclusion

Most consumers today have the misconception that once their website is launched, it will be found on every search engine that day. However, as explained above, it can take several months (or not at all if you fail to optimize your meta tags, search engine submission, etc.) for your website to be listed for free.

An interesting thing to note is that no matter how long a search engine spider spends following links, there is no way for them to find every page listed on the World Wide Web. There are millions upon millions of web pages that do not have any links to them from other sites. Without these links, the search engine spiders are unable to find and index those pages, leaving them a mystery to anyone who doesn't already know they exist.

Therefore, it is very important to advertise your website as much as possible by either placing it as a link on other websites, submitting your website to the search engines, and taking advantage of our meta tag system through your Update page.