A recent news release stated that only 65% of real estate professionals have their own website. The same release suggested that of those, only 10% of those sites actually did their owners any real good in producing business. According to the NAR®, some 80+% of residential real estate sales begin on or involve the internet. Put those two statistics together, and it would appear that less than 10% of all real estate professionals are making money from the internet, but the ones that do are making plenty of it. After all, if a majority of real estate agents and Realtors® won't grab the internet with both hands, it simply makes those who do thrive and prosper more. It's a Zero-Sum' thing: the 80% of all sales that start on the internet will just keep going to those 10% who embrace the internet. Ho-hum.

The chances are good that you are not one of those people making money from the internet. Do you ever wonder "Why not?"

After all, you did put up your website. You did buy that page on Realtor.com. You do have an email address. You do have a page on your company's website. You're part of the move to online marketing. Where are the orders? Where are the leads? What is the big deal about this internet thing? As far as you can see, it hasn't brought you nearly enough leads or sales to justify what you are spending on it.

If the foregoing paragraph describes your opinion or experience, here is the most common reason that you may not be getting the leads and sales from the Internet that others do receive:

1. No one can find your site when they go looking for homes on the internet.

There are many reasons this may be so, but the most familiar are the following four, which are common explanations for not being able to be found. It may be hard to visualize, but perhaps if you think of an imaginary billboard floating around in outer space, you would make the connection: the billboard is real, but no one on Earth can see it. Likewise, your website is real, but if it can't be found, no one on Earth can see it. (Click here to know if your site can be found by internet buyers. This must be evaluated by real human beings, not machines, and one will call you with the results and the reasons.)

2. You're on a "Mothership" site. Having a page on Realtor.com or on your company's corporate site is nice, but not necessarily effective. I read where Realtor.com has about 7 million page views a month, and I see how the operators of that site trumpet that as a big selling point to Realtors®. NAR® has over a million members. If every member goes to the site to look at their listings just three times monthly, that would indicate the true non-member level of visitors to that site. If that ratio held true, that would be about ONE or TWO non-member visits per Realtor®, per month. Even if the foregoing is an oversimplification, the point should be obvious: traffic of a few views monthly isn't going to get anyone much in the way of leads or sales.

3. Your html tags were never properly written, so although your website is "optimized" it is optimized for the wrong targets. Most website providers leave the choice of tags to the developer or the client (that's you). Some use computer generated tags. Some providers do a better job than others in these tags; some do nothing about them. In either instance, they may not be properly optimized for you. To see if you have that problem, pull your site up, go across your navigation bar to "View" then scroll down to "Page Source." Click on page source and a new window will open in your browser. That's your html code. See what it says on your <title> tag. Does it say "Home" or some other equally non-descriptive thing that does not describe what you do and where? That usually means you need your tags written to reflect what you sell and where you are. Without that little piece of finishing, your site is not findable by search engines or searchers. This section of your website is never seen by viewers; it is only read by the computers that run the internet. Computers are very literal machines: they follow instructions exactly. The instructions about what the computer should do about your site are contained in these tags, and none is more important than your title tag. This little line of html code is about the single most important part of people being able to find you that you can do anything about, yourself. Accompanying this tag are your <meta> tags, more instructions which further specify how your site is to be catalogued for the searching buyer. With no disrespect intended, if you saw the abuses in this area that we see each day, you would understand that there aren't that many folks out there who really have any idea about how to write proper html tags for your website. They don't suffer, but your site and its efficiency do!

4. You're on a Frameset site. <frameset> was a technology used early on in the web development business. Because, in the early days of the internet, adults sites were usually frameset, such sites were excluded from the search engines algorithms (formulas) for ranking sites, Frameset sites are invisible to search engines. You would think that - because this knowledge is widespread - web developers would not program in <frameset>. If you think that, you would be wrong. As one well-known website company replied when asked why they would continue to knowingly produce websites for realtors that cannot be indexed by search engines, they replied: "That's not our problem. We give our customers beautiful sites, and that's what they want. Getting them found isn't our business." Well, getting your website found is YOUR business and I urge you to avoid all <frameset> websites. If you will check your site's html code by performing the procedure in Paragraph 3 above and if you see "<frameset>" running down the left margin anywhere, I recommend that you change your site provider immediately, unless, of course, you don't want to be found by internet buyers..

5. When your web developer, website provider (or you) created your html tags, they chose phrases with too much competition where you cannot perform without professional help. This cause of non-performance is very common because most real estate professionals and their webmasters do not have the tools at their fingertips to see what traffic is associated with a particular phrase. It's all guesswork. Confused? Don't be. Here's a simple example: If you sell real estate in, say, Metro Atlanta, you would probably like to put "Atlanta Real Estate" on your title tag. That would be a bad idea because while 755,000+ people went on line last month and typed in ?Atlanta Real Estate', the search depth on that phrase is 32,300,000 - meaning that number of pages are linked to that phrase by the search engines. Since your office really is in, say, Dunwoody GA , you'd be better to LOCALIZE your title to properly reflect your real target market. "Dunwoody GA Real Estate" had 8,812 people enter that phrase in a search engine last month, and the depth is only 253,000; meaning that you can perform on it - your site can be seen and has a fighting chance to be found. Plus over 8800 real human beings looked for real estate on that exact phrase LAST MONTH! Why not move your website to where those people are looking and snare a few of them as they cruise by? To use another analogy, let's suppose you wanted to take your young child to a place where he or she could catch their first trout. Somewhere is a huge lake, just brimming with hungry trout. There's also a little pond, stream or lake nearby where hardly anyone goes except those who know where to be certain to catch a trout. Which one would you choose? Your child might have a problem catching a trout from the rocks beside Lake Michigan, but would have a much easier time of it in your neighbor's backyard stocked pond! You'll have more success doing the same. Do your fishing in a pond where your offerings stand out; don't overreach

The irony of the situation is that precisely because there are so many real estate pages on the web, choosing popular searches may relegate your site to obscurity and non-performance. The actual reason you can't be found may be partially repairable at no cost and with ease. (We will send you a booklet that tells you how to do so, free, upon your request, and no one will call you, either.)

Over $11 billion was spent on real estate advertising last year. You can make sure your site can be found for about $240 a month. Spending the money to make sure your site can be found brings you REAL leads, and if even just a few of those REAL leads turn into sales, you are way ahead financially. If your site can't be found now it will continue to be just an ineffective electronic billboard that no buyers ever see. Others will fill the vacuum and service the online buyer.

The five reasons why the internet may not be working for you can often be distilled to that one basic reason: be it poor tags, bad programming, or just poor content, none of it really matters when no one can find you or your website. What matters is that your site cannot be found (and looking under your name doesn't count. If you wanted to attract folks who already know you, you wouldn't be reading this column!). The reasons can vary, but the consequences of not being able to be found never vary: when you can't be found, you might as well not even bother to have a website. If you shouldn't bother to have a website, maybe you should think about trying to be successful in another line of business, because Real Estate and the internet are permanently and inextricably linked. With the unarguable fact that 80+% of residential real estate sales begin on or involve the internet, and the estimate that only just under 10% of real estate professionals have an effective website, I think you would agree that there is a tremendous window open now for those serious about pursuing internet buyers. It may not be the best time economically, but it may be the last best time to begin the process of making your online marketing more effective. While it isn't early in the game, it is still not too late to catch this marketing opportunity before it is filled to capacity.

For certain, a lot of your competitors are now doing just that. When are you going to get started? ©2007 Mike Parker