I think that it was 1998 when I first saw a spike in the number of people jumping on the bandwagon rush to get a website up and running.  As a real estate practitioner, following that path was inevitable and down right necessary.  In that time, we have seen all kinds of website services offered from simple plug and go template driven websites to full fledged IT and personnel backed operations offering all sorts of services that an independent realtor or an entire frachise could deploy.

But I have to say that over the years I did see a lot of sites go up; unfortunately, a lot of them went up in the days of InfoSeek and Lycos and AltaVista.  Those were the search engines that used to base their search criteria on the meta tags (i.e., keywords) that a webmaster or site owner would put on their website.  And unfortunately, when webmasters found out how easily this was to manipulate by putting in their choice of keywords (even if the content was irrelevant) you soon saw pages climbing to the top of the search engines that had little or nothing to do with the subject matter of the website!  With google just coming onto the scene with a search engine algorithm that was much more advanced then simply looking at meta tags, it was soon apparent who would be dominating the search engine market and exterminating the others.  Google has not been bumped since and has of course, taken over the world of search engines and paid placement marketing.

Which leads me to wonder why so many people still have their websites configured for meta tags and 1998 methods of search engine optimization?  Ah, and then I realized why.  As I pulled up realtor web pages from realtor dot com and other sites that had agents creating their own sites by their own means, I could see that they had taken the task and responsibility of making their own sites on their own accord.  I found sites with no meta data at all to sites with all sorts of "interesting" configurations kept coming up.

(By the way, if you are wondering how difficult it is to view the meta tags of a website, its really not  that hard to do, just go and visit a website by typing its URL on the browser address bar.  Once you land on the site (and depending on your browser):

With Internet Explorer:
Hit the Alt key and in the Menu Bar select View and then Source

With FireFox:
Hit the Alt key and in the Menu Bar select View then Page Source

With Opera:   
Hit the Alt key and under the Menu Bar select View and then Source

With Safari:   
Hit the Alt key and in the Menu Bar select View then View Source

And there you will see all of the the keywords and even more useful information like:

What is in between < title >  < /title > is what the title of the website is.

For example:< title > My Personal Site < /title >

What is in between < meta name="keywords" content=“”/ > are the keywords for that website. 

For example: < meta name="keywords" content=“personal site, my site, what a site, me site, personal my site”/>

And what is in between <meta name="description" content=“”/> is the description for that website.  For example: < meta name="description" content=“My Personal Site is the Best in the Internet." />)

Things have changed a lot since meta tag optimization, and websites are now taking a side step to the much more powerful and robust BLOGS.  Unfortunately, most website service companies still offer basic website configurations and "social" blog configurations that don't meet the demanding marketing needs of Realtors. 

Although almost all website provider companies attach the bells and whistles to their services that can make someone feel like they have a good website, when they add chat or forums or visitor counters, it doesn't make up for the fact that a truely powerful and effective marketing site must deliver three things to be considered worthy of its expense:

1) It must generate a steady stream of warm leads at some level (wether with paid search or organic results)

2) It must deliver timely and ongoing information feeds and content to its recurring and unique visitors, and

3) It must generate the necessary revenues to at least cover its own operating expenses somehow.

Despite the headaches and frustrations of having to go through a learning curve again, it must be done because unlike 1995 when there were only 18,000 websites on the internet, there are now over 1 Billion.

Consumers going online and searching for their own properties in the belief that they don't need anything from Realtors (now that they have online search) are doing so because marketing venues are not being focused on them to the level that technology can.  Most basic realtor websites still say "look at me" instead of saying to the visitor, "here" is what you need.  Those same consumers are then turning to forums, blogs and chat rooms to find answers to their questions when their local expert is right in their backyard.

If you survived 2008 so far, please take some time to consider the need to use the time remaining in this year to overhaul your internet presence in a way that makes real estate prospects dependent on YOU for their information needs. I therefore recommend you take the following steps:

1) Perform a website optimization analysis of your website or blog (most can be done free online)

2) Review your site's content and make sure that it matches your keywords (you are penalized if they don't match what search engine (google, msn, yahoo, ask.com) 'bots look for when they crawl your sites). Again this can be done for free with keyword relevance analysis tools easily available online for free.

3) Look into a blog if you don't have one yet and make sure you tell the world what you know (preferably on a daily or every 2nd or 3rd day basis).

4) Compare what your present website provider gives you in the form of tools and then look at others for comparisons and prices (they have changed in your favor over the years).

And finally, be careful not to fall victim to "over stimuli" in the form of "website over load syndrome."  I can tell you I saw many many realtors spending days and weeks and months on in trying to configure their websites (in their view) instead of focusing on what they do best: real estate sales! Take a targeted website marketing course or get some help, but just don't leave your marketing efforts to chance.  After all, every dollar counts.