On another post I saw an new inspector set of goal of dominating the web with his site. Thats a great goal but you need to figure out how you want to be found. For example, if I say I want to dominate all searches for "Anacortes Home Inspection" then my goal is to have my website come up in the first 5 organic listings - such as this
http://www.google.com/search?q=anacortes+home+inspection&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

For some mysterious reason Google actually gave me two listings and my pay per click ad showed up on the right side.

To get here you need to figure out the words that people would use to search for a home inspector or real estate in your area and optimize your site to show up on the top page of the search engines. A good primer is here
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization . This is not something that happens overnight. Google will scan your  site slowly in the beginning and then more frequently if it see regular changes.  For example  mine was just scanned 5 days  ago and will probably be  scanned a week from now. Active Rain probably gets scanned daily.

By budgeting an hour or two a week you can get to where people will find you. In some markets such as large cities you will have to be very selective about which words you select as the more competitive the words are the tougher it will be to get to the top. Research your words carefully and start with easy words. Another tip is each page can have its own words. For example I have a town to the south of me called Oak Harbor. So I created a page focusing on those words http://www.google.com/search?q=oak+harbor+home+inspection&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

The fact that Oak Harbor is also in many of my other pages does help. I also recently saw a post where a Realtor paid a reduced fee to be ranked on Yahoo. Although this is good,  63% of surfers use Google.  Will a higher ranking on Yahoo help you on Google? Yes, but their are no assurances. If your going to pay someone concentrate on Google and the result will also show on other search engines.  For example :

 http://www.ask.com/web?q=oak+harbor+home+inspection&search=search&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=oak+harbor+home+inspection&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8

Whats notable is the Microsoft's Live engine doesn't have us until page 3, why I don't know but since MSN Live only represents 11% of all searches i won't lose sleep over it!

//Rick