SEO For Insurance Websites
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The internet revolution has forever changed the world, and your insurance business is no exception. So you spend valuable time and money to develop a website.
Build it and they will come, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Today, domaintools.com shows that there are 122,410,433 domains registered, with 77,938 new domains registered in the past 24 hours.
So how do you make your website stand out? More to the point, how do you make it easy for your prospective customers to find your site amongst the many?
The answer lies in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
This post is about SEO, I will discuss SEM later.
Wikipedia defines SEO as ‘the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.’
SEO can be divided into 2 areas: on-page and off page factors.
On-Page SEO Factors
The actual content on a web page is extremely important. On-page factors include, but are not limited to:
- Page Title
- Description
- Keywords
- Heading Tags
- Alt Image Tags
- Content
Although the on-page factors should be taken into consideration from the very beginning of website development, very often they are not, making it necessary to go back and make changes after the fact.
Off-Page SEO Factors
If you want your website to rank high in the search engines, and therefore attract free targeted traffic, the off-page factors are absolutely critical. Once your website is up and running this is where the work begins. Here are just a couple of things to consider to promote your website online, and make it look more authoritative to the search engines:
Link Building
Of primary importance is the number and quality of links pointing to your website form others. You can think of each link to your site as a vote of affirmation that your site is a valuable resource.
But it’s not enough to have more incoming links than your competitor. The actual text used in the link, called anchor text, should contain the keywords, or keyword phrases, that you want your site to rank highly for when someone does a search in a search engine. The anchor text shows the search engines that your site is relevant for that particular keyword.
It is also important to have links pointing to pages other than the home page. This is called deep linking.
There are more than a few ways to build links. A couple are mentioned below, and I’ll discuss more in later posts.
Article Directory Posting
Article directories provide not only a means to build links, but an opportunity to establish your expertise in your field. All you need is a well written 500 or so word article, published on an established article directory, with a short bio and link back to your site.
Here is a list of prominent article directories.
Forums
Join relevant forums and become part of the discussion. Put a link to your website in your signature and every time you post on the forum you will be adding a link to your site.
When getting involved with forums take the time to get to know the culture of that particular forum. Don’t just charge in and post a lot, you can get yourself thrown off a forum that way. Become part of the discussion and strive to add value to the forum.
Blog Comments
Another way to increase your incoming link count is to make comments on others blog post. Most blog comment forms have a field for your website, and uses the name you use as anchor text to link to it. Use your name @ your keyword as your username.
The truth is that link building takes a lot of time and effort. But unless you have the budget for other types of advertisement it is an essential part of any successful website.
