Some truths about search engines.

Search engines are a great, no-cost marketing tool for your real estate business, but many real estate website owners fail to recognize several hard truths about a search engine's role in promoting their business:

Any on-line company basing its business model on customers obtained just from free advertising is doomed to fail.

A search engine is not your friend: its prime role is providing answers, not promoting your business website.

Search engine rankings can change at any time for any reason without warning. You have no guarantee that your top ranking today will be there tomorrow.

No website "deserves" to be in the top ten search results. Why should your site be there? What do you really offer that is different from your competitors?

Don't expect search engine success if you do not offer content that has value - your site visitors will appreciate this even more and may become customers.

Agents and brokers can have productive real estate websites that bring them quality visitors and conversions, but like anything else, you do have to put a little work into it. In the articles and links on this site, we hope to provide you with some solid information that will make creating a profitable real estate website easier.

One final word: all the information here is based on experience, research, experiment and by following best practices. There are no "tricks" here and no "shortcuts to the top." Techniques like that can work in the short term, but are not something to build a business on.

Knowledge is power. Learn and succeed.