People use the search engines in many different ways, as well. For example, if I want to see how much a Chrysler Sebring convertible costs, what colors they have, or what options might be standard, I could check on this several ways.

Some people might type in a question to Google, "What's the cost of a Chrysler Sebring?"  Look at the results you get...

Though not perfect, it's interesting that with a search such as that, you don't seem to get the Chrysler website!  Instead, you get other sites that give reviews on the car, automobile auction sites, and every kind of thing EXCEPT the Chrysler website.

Now, we type just the words "Chrysler Sebring" in.   Ah, there it is at number one!  Now why did this happen?

My first thoughts would be search engine optimization, or perhaps a LACK of it.

I think if I were the person in charge of their website, the first thing I would think of that I'd want to be found for would be the COST of my particular line of automobiles.  Personally, I would assume that would be a very highly searched part of buying a car.  Is there a way to tell?

Let me say that I am actually doing this as I type. I have not searched for this, although I'm badly wanting a Sebring at this time.
So this is EXACTLY what I would go through if I sat down to advise the company on its best search terms.

I will also say that I'm not going to spend an hour experimenting on different terms just to write this little explanation, so we are going to assume that it's VERY important to them just to know about this particular car...

There are several ways to check keyword popularity for webmasters to use.   Three of the best are:
The Overture Keyword Selector Tool
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool
The Digital Point Free Keyword Tool 

For ease and quickness, I generally start out with Overture.  There are no bells and whistles there...just type in a term and it gives you the most searched variations of it, and in descending order.  This is by the previous MONTH's searches, and will change monthly.  Here is what I see for June 2006 when I type in "Chrysler Sebring" on Overture's tool:

Hmmm...nothing about the cost here.  Guess I'll have to be specific.

Let's keep in mind that there were 1340 searches for the car itself. Note: This would be the searches performed only on the engines that use Overture for advertising; mostly Yahoo and MSN at this time. (And Yahoo just announced it was no longer using them)

Ouch!  On Overture's tool, there were no recorded searches for COST or PRICE.
I must have a weird mind.  I will try Google's tool...

The same results!   So sometimes you just don't know.   I would have thought that to be a very important term.  My Bad.  It's a good thing we have these tools!

This is an example of what a search engine optimization company would do when first consulting with a client.

Let's type in "car prices", and see what we get.

Wow.  There were a whopping 61,626 searches for "car New Price" (probably as New Car Price), and 52,713 for just "Car Price".

So I would seriously consider optimizing Chrysler's website for these generic terms, as well as the names of all of their particular models.  If done correctly, and with a highly ranked website, you could optimize "Chrysler Sebring" and also optimize "Price" and "Cost", and put Chrysler's site at the top of the search for our term as well.  More on this in a minute...

So how do you optimize a website?
• Include the term in the title
• Include the term in the text on the page
• Include the term in a picture's ALT Tag
• Include the term in links from other websites to yours

Of course there's much more to it than this, but in a nutshell, these are the basic steps that we take to let the search engines know what our website is all about, and which terms it should show up for.

Now, back to my statement about a highly ranked website being found for both...

Each of the search engines has a different set of rules that it ranks a website's importance by.  We often speak of this as the particular engine's "Algorithim".

Google, which is the most important of all of them, judges your realtor website primarily by how many times other websites link to you.   A combination of the number of incoming or "BACK-LINKS" your site has, the type of those links, the rank of the site that links to you, and possibly even the type and rank of sites that link to IT---all make up what is known as the Google Page Rank(tm). Here it is in Google's Own Words:

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

If you have a really well linked, optimized website packed with great content, some age on it, and you've done everything as best as you can, you should be able to rank well for many different phrases that your customer might type in.  You should only pick a few for your homepage, but you can make any number of inside pages to go into detail and pick up the many ways that a person might search for your product.

Yahoo's algorithim seems to be based more on how many times the phrase appears on a page, and in what ways it appears.   In addition to that, it appears to me that they are slowly but surely attempting to punish a website that has too many links.   I'm sure there are plenty of SEO people who would disagree with me on WHY they are doing it, but they are now penalizing many real estate websites (for instance) that have made pages and pages of reciprocal "directory" links to other real estate sites.  This has been the way Advanced Access.com and several other large real estate design companies have been "optimizing" for several years now.   Suddenly, these website owners have to decide whether to delete the majority of them to please Yahoo and possibly lower their ranking on Google...or do the smart thing and get links from other sources instead.

MSN's algorithim seems to be a combination of on-page optimization and links, as well as the quality of the coding on a page.   The other two do not seem to care about the coding, except in the case where there are lines and lines of javascript and other markup language that supersedes or crowds out the actual text.

The whole concept of Search Engine Optimization is huge and complicated.  If it's something you've decided to learn for yourself, be prepared to read and absorb until your eyes bug out...:-)

There will soon be a blog for this site, and I'll try to take on different aspects of real estate SEO, as it's called, on there.