In the "old days" of the Internet, mastery of the search engines required equal parts black magic and rocket science to consistently see results. The good news is that today, anyone can achieve top visibility position in most of the major search engines with very little effort or cost.

Bidding Your Way To The Top

Thanks to a new kind of search engine model called "pay-per-click" (PPC), you can literally bid your way to the top of search engine results for any search keyword or phrase. Overture.com is the largest and most important PPC search engine available on the Net. Here is how it works:

When you search for any real estate related term or phrase, each result will have a "cost to advertiser" attached to it. This indicates how much it will cost the owner of the site if someone clicks their link in the search results. For example, using Overture to search for "San Antonio Real Estate" (without the quotes) you will see results in decreasing order by how much the Web site owner is willing to pay for you to click on the link to their site. As of this writing, the top three positions cost $0.71, $0.67, and $0.28 respectively. This means that if someone else "bids" $0.29 for that same search phrase, they will show in the third position, and knock the current third position holder down to fourth position.

This is important to know because Overture supplies search results to many of the other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, Altavista, and Lycos) —but only for the top three search results! This means (using our example above) that for only $0.29 per click, you will be shown third from the top in visibility when prospects search for "San Antonio Real Estate" on Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Altavista, and Lycos. In fact, you will be above most other results on those search engines, including sites that paid a lot of money to experts to place high in each one.

Pay Only For Results

The beauty of this kind of model is that you only pay for results (i.e. people actually arriving at your site) and it is very easy to implement. All you do is go to the bottom of the Overture.com site and click on the link that says "List Your Site" and follow the simple registration directions. For the least expensive option it will take about five days to start seeing your site in the search results for the search phrase you choose to bid on.

Choosing the appropriate search phrases that create results is critical. Also, some search phrases are so competitive that they are bid up beyond reason (as of this writing, "Kansas City Real Estate" costs $2.46 per click for top position!). The trick is to choose search terms that prospects actually use, and won't cost you a small fortune (see my Tip Of The Month on how to easily find the search terms that work for you). Finally, if you plan on staying within the critical top three positions for a particular search phrase, your bids need to be regularly monitored and adjusted, otherwise you will either be "bumped" out of position or pay to much. By the way, administering your PPC bid positions is a perfect job for your Virtual Assistant!

This is just the beginning of traffic generating possibilities using PPC search engines. Don't miss next month's online "Ask Mr. Internet!" as I cover an exciting new twist to this model provided by one of the biggest and most popular search engines on the Net —Google!

(NOTE: Mr. Internet, his company and staff receive no compensation whatsoever from any third party vendors or service providers. Investigate any products or services found on the Net thoroughly to your satisfaction before using them at your own risk.)