You finally see your real estate web site is ranked on the search engines THEN BAM! It's nowhere. Why does that happen

It depends (don't you hate that answer).

It depends on what is going on with your site. I'll start from new site to established and try to cover as many instances as I can writing this at 3am. Its the only time from a crazy life (but fun) that I can write here these days. All my opinions are under the assumptions that you made a real estate web site design and marketing strategy  and are using proper and accepted real estate seo techniques.  

If your domain name is new  then your real estate web site design won't take effect right away on all search engines. However, you WILL get placed temporarily sometime in the first few months (depending on your real estate seo strategy). This is how some SEO guys or girls do the quick scam (see real estate seo scams ) but for us with our performace guarantee contract we do projects based on your sales not flash pan results or lead hype.

So it goes like this usually; put site up, optimize and do real estate seo and notify search engines to visit and then wait for them to start learning your site. I SAY wait but that is in relation to the search engines. To get top ranking you should always be working on your site (blog entries, listing updates, etc.)

Usually sometime in the next 60 days your site will show up on the first page of MSN Yahoo and Google for a while. But do a search for the term you came up on. Somewhere up top it will say Results 1-10 of

The next number is how many OTHER sites that may be competing for the top page of the search engine.

So as you are trying to stay on the first page, many other sites are hiring professional real estate web site masters and seo gurus to get THEIR site to the first page for the same phrase.

Its the real estate web site version of musical chairs  as thousands of websites are vying for the first page that only allows 10 websites to be on for free (not including pay per click where you pay to be on the first page). The search engines crawl millions of sites and adjust rankings of their search engines daily depending on their internal algorithms which they keep secret so people don't cheat and build sites that are meaningless to web site visitors but sell ads and other things not related to the subject they thought they were coming to a site for.

The search engines crawl sites all the time and then make their adjustments to the pages all the time too. Regular sites that only have a few pages (under 100) the search engines can index fully after just 2 or 3 visits (seach engines can check all of page but index a few pages a visit) but Organic real estate web sites are 10 times larger so it takes months of visits for them to learn fully what their site is about.

So they are learning your site as they learn others.....bit by bit.... and in the process of getting through larger sites they rank you based on the pages they have indexed up to the point of reporting results in their search results.

Another thing I need to bring up is that along with good websites with good intentions, there are real estate web site webmasters and seo gurus that try to cheat. Its in every business but because real estate web sites are just coming of age, search engines robots aren't smart enough yet to fully penalize the many real estate web site design companies and real estate seo people that do just enough to get paid. They do just enough to show results then get paid and leave. In another year or so they will be forced to do things the way the internet was intended to be made or they will be out of business as the search engines computer programs they use to crawl and learn get smarter.

So...let's put this all together. Search engine results come from a daily snapshot of sites they have evaluated recently, last week or months ago. Combine that with Organic real estate web sites and trick web sites (made from scammers that just use holes in search engines programs used to crawl and rank sites) pushing for placement.

There is allot going on in the process but here is the factor that will explain the process concerning the placement evolution of our sites. Unlike many top mass producing real estate web site makers or the one person web shops, our sites have over 900 pages of REAL real estate web site content (isnt it funny how competitors are NOW upgrading to our level after they get spanked by yahoo). When we say REAL real estate web content we mean that all pages are ON your site not centrally located someplace else and made to LOOK like its on your site. Large MEGA site producers do that so they can manage page changes or links pages globally rather than the way the internet was intended.

Our large sites have a curve