OT: Does paying to get your site on search engines work?

[Cringer]

Ok, so my wife is looking to get a website going for business reasons (she is a realtor now). She has had a few 'clients' from out of town already who look to buy housing as investments. With this area being on CNN this last week as one of the top 5 growth areas over the next 5 years (as in housing price growth) chances are more people will be looking to invest (buy houses) from out of town. She already has a guy from IL this week who wants to buy 5 houses and for her to find them.

Anyways, she wants a website. It would be good for local people as well I am sure. I am guessing anyone searching this area specifically would get her site listed on a search, but being new there would probably be 100,000 other realtor's site ahead of hers.

So how would you get it to be higher up on search engines? I know you can pay companies that say they will do it, but I want to know if it actually works? I am skeptical about it.

[Rizon]

Your wife is a REALTOR®, not a realtor.

Sorry, had to say it. :D

[chinaski]

this is all you would ever need....
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34397

[Icy]

Two ways:

1st- Use pay per click engines. Google through adwords and yahoo through Overture and also other engines through MIVA sell advertisement in the search results (microsoft will start soon too sell search results in msn). It's a bidding method. For example you want your link appear for the keyword "real state", you bid $0.20 per click made on your link and i bid $0.21 per click, then my link will appear above yours. Depending on the keywords and competence it can be from so cheap to so expensive. (for the casino keyword in UK you pay like $4 per click).

2nd- Pay a SEO (search engine optimizer) to setup your website pages and to do some tricks to have you in a nice position for some keywords search results. You won't pay anybody per click but you need to pay the SEO guy for that work and if he is a real SEO (there are lots of scamers) he won't be cheap.

I recomend 1st unless you are really experienced to not to be fooled by fake SEO's. I do it all the time so feel free to ask if you have more questions.

[Cringer]

Sorry RIZON. :D

Thanks to Icy, very informative, and chinaksi, Googlebots I am well aware of but leading them to the site basically is good point too.

[Deattribution]

I know youre asking about search engine effectiveness, but I'd say a realtor's most effective advertisement is local (signs, billboard, business cards and the like). The site will help, and can be advertised the same way but generally in my experience people who are very serious simply ask for the top agents so making a name for yourself helps.

[Cringer]

I know youre asking about search engine effectiveness, but I'd say a realtor's most effective advertisement is local (signs, billboard, business cards and the like). The site will help, and can be advertised the same way but generally in my experience people who are very serious simply ask for the top agents so making a name for yourself helps.

Oh yeah, no doubt there. She has local stuff covered pretty much, but the website would be good for people from other areas like I said, and that could be real good for her.