It all starts with the analysis and design. And no, I don’t mean the pretty pictures and a spinning logo. To take advantage of visitors coming to your site through search engines (a.k.a free marketing) you need to do your homework. For proper Search Engine Optimization, the majority of design happens in a word processor rather than a graphic design tool.
Background Education
Search engine spiders are programs that automatically read your web site (called crawling). They suck in the text on your entire web site and store it on a server to be digested by algorithms based upon keywords for later retrieval (called indexing). So on Google when you type in “auto insurance” you are actually looking at a snapshot from the last time those sites were visited by the spiders. This could be daily or even monthly depending on how often Google decides to crawl the site.
That being said, every word and every position of words on your pages count big time. It actually even goes much further than that. The correct keywords that are searched need to show up not only in the body of your page text, but also in the page title and address! Test it yourself. Type in any keyword into Google and examine the results. Your keywords will show up in BOLD within the results. Notice that the BOLD words probably appear in all three locations described. (NOTE: if you qualify your search with a geographical location through a keyword or automatically through GPS on a smart phone, then you may get a map. Ignore the results since that needs to be discussed n another article).
What Can You Do?
Here are three simple steps you can do to get started:
It starts off with the domain name. Pick a domain that contains keywords. SmithSmithAndJonesAgency.com may be your name, but new customers don’t know your identity. Try something that people type into search engines like “Miami cheap auto quotes” or similar. Also you want to try and get a domain that ends in .COM, .NET, or .ORG domain name. Ignore all the other possible extensions.
Fill your pages with relevant content. Use the words in your domain name within human readable sentences within the body and title of your pages. Put lots of text on the pages. However the percentage of keywords can’t be too high or the page may be considered as SAPM. Also DO NOT COPY text from other sites you own or don’t own. If Google sees duplicate content, then you will get dinged! Google the term “keyword density” to find out more.
Use multiple sites. Whoever said you can only have one web site? You may already have SmithSmithAndJonesAgency.com and that’s great; keep it. But build mini-sites using your new domain names and content. You can have them all point back to SmithSmithAndJonesAgency.com but each site needs to be centric to each line such as auto, home, car, life, health, etc.
This was a quick little article to get agents started in the right direction. Notice we didn’t talk about graphics? Although they are important for the visitor experience and you don’t want to look like a fly-by-night operation, in the world of search engines they really don’t mean much… for now
Background Education
Search engine spiders are programs that automatically read your web site (called crawling). They suck in the text on your entire web site and store it on a server to be digested by algorithms based upon keywords for later retrieval (called indexing). So on Google when you type in “auto insurance” you are actually looking at a snapshot from the last time those sites were visited by the spiders. This could be daily or even monthly depending on how often Google decides to crawl the site.
That being said, every word and every position of words on your pages count big time. It actually even goes much further than that. The correct keywords that are searched need to show up not only in the body of your page text, but also in the page title and address! Test it yourself. Type in any keyword into Google and examine the results. Your keywords will show up in BOLD within the results. Notice that the BOLD words probably appear in all three locations described. (NOTE: if you qualify your search with a geographical location through a keyword or automatically through GPS on a smart phone, then you may get a map. Ignore the results since that needs to be discussed n another article).
What Can You Do?
Here are three simple steps you can do to get started:
- It starts off with the domain name.
Pick a domain that contains keywords. SmithSmithAndJonesAgency.com may be your name, but new customers don’t know your identity. Try something that people type into search engines like “Miami cheap auto quotes” or similar. Also you want to try and get a domain that ends in .COM, .NET, or .ORG domain name. Ignore all the other possible extensions.
- Fill your pages with relevant content.
Use the words in your domain name within human readable sentences within the body and title of your pages. Put lots of text on the pages. However the percentage of keywords can’t be too high or the page may be considered as SAPM. Also DO NOT COPY text from other sites you own or don’t own. If Google sees duplicate content, then you will get dinged! Google the term “keyword density” to find out more.Use multiple sites.
- Whoever said you can only have one web site?
You may already have SmithSmithAndJonesAgency.com and that’s great; keep it. But build mini-sites using your new domain names and content. You can have them all point back to SmithSmithAndJonesAgency.com but each site needs to be centric to each line such as auto, home, car, life, health, etc.
This was a quick little article to get agents started in the right direction. Notice we didn’t talk about graphics? Although they are important for the visitor experience and you don’t want to look like a fly-by-night operation, in the world of search engines they really don’t mean much… for now.
