If you want to catch rain, you have to put out buckets. Here are some tips for how to get your website ranking in the search engines.
Make sure that your code is error-free
Run your url through http://validator.w3.org/ to make sure that your code is free of html errors.
Fix broken links
Use Xenu’s Link Sleuth to find broken links to your website. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account
This tool will show you how Google crawls your site and help you identify specific problems that Google encounters while visiting your site. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?pli=1
Also add an xml sitemap (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/) in your Webmaster Tools account to help Google better crawl your website.
Update your page titles
A page title is the line of text that appears at the top of any browser. It is difficult to overstate the importance of page titles. The better your page titles, the better your page rank — so write good, relevant page titles. The page title is often used as the heading of your listing in the organic search results. It is the first thing that searchers see. “Welcome to Sam Conner’s website” is NOT a good page title. “Naples Real Estate Agent - Sam Conner” is a much better page title. People don’t search for “welcome + sam conner;” they search for “naples real estate agent.” Keep your titles under 64 characters, otherwise the title will not display fully. Never use the same page title for all of your web pages. Work relevant keywords into your page titles, but make them reader friendly, else searchers will skip past your listing. Do not keyword stuff; write in plain language. Do not use stop words such as “a” or “the.” Search engines ignore these words, so you are just wasting valuable space. Instead, use separators such as “-” or “|”
Keyword research
Use the Yahoo keyword tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ to identify keywords to use in your page titles and page headers. This search tool only represents 1/3 of searches, and the data is old (January 2007) because Yahoo no longer supports the tool. However, the results provide a good gauge of monthly search activity. The tool does not always work well because it is most often overloaded with usage. Keep trying, though. It does come up sometimes.
Old domain names
If you have an established domain name, don’t change it. Search engines give more weight to older domain names. To Google, old is good.
Content is KING
Search engine spiders love text. Stay away from fancy stuff like Flash unless it is absolutely necessary. Write lots of text content and post many pages to your site so that you have “landing pages” where visitors can find you. Landing pages also provide pages that you can optimize using your keyword research to write good page titles.
No JavaScript
Stay away from JavaScript as it causes trouble for spiders.
Do not buy links
Never buy links. Sites with bought links may be penalized. Links associated with paid advertising are fine; those meant to manipulate search results could get you banned from Google.
No dirty tricks
Never use tricks like hidden text or duplicate content on multiple domain names.
Use hyphens in your page extensions
Separate file names with hyphens rather than underscores. Google views www.mysite.com/real-estate.html as real estate (good), but www.mysite.com/realestate.html as realestate (not good).
Link building
Search engine optimization revolves around link building. Creating incoming links to your site will help your search rankings. Develop good, external links to your site by blogging or submitting articles to sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com. A website that exists as an island (no one links to it) will not do well in the search engine rankings. If you write an article with your url at the bottom (in the resource box if you go with ezinearticles.com), that provides an incoming link to your site. Establish a blog on a site like http://activerain.com/. Put a hyperlink at the bottom of each post — some to your home page and some to internal pages. Google thinks of links as “votes” for your site, so the more links directed to your site the better. Check the incoming links to your site using http://www.backlinkwatch.com/. You can also check your competitors’ external links.
Check the competition
Use http://www.nichewatch.com/ to see which of your competitors rank for your niche keywords.
Deep linking
Whether from directory listings, blog posts, articles or wherever your links come from, make sure that you utilize deep linking. A deep link is a link to a page on your site other than your homepage. If all of your links point to your home page, it looks as though your site has little value as anything more than a virtual business card. It can also make your links look as though they have been automated. Post a blog or write an article and place a deep link at the bottom so that the reader can obtain more information from your website.
Link text
Mix up your link text. You do not want all of your link text to be your web site address. Use your company name, your url, or a descriptive title as the link text.
Bold or highlight
Highlight or bold a couple of keywords near the top of each page.
Submit to directories
Submit to http://www.dmoz.org/. A listing in DMOZ is golden. It can take 1-6 months or even longer to get listed, but if you get listed it will boost your search engine rankings. DMOZ is free, but be careful to follow their submission guidelines to the letter. Google continually spiders DMOZ, so your pages are almost guaranteed to remain in Google’s index if your site is listed in DMOZ. Being in DMOZ will help your Google rankings as well as smaller search engine rankings because most of the smaller players pull from the DMOZ database.
Another good way to get directory links is to use www.best-web-directories.com. They will submit your site to directories. They have a weekly submission service, but you must do an initial purchase before you can apply for the weekly submission service. The weekly service is a good deal because you can build directory listings slowly (13 per week) so that it doesn’t look out of the ordinary to Google.
Page headers
A page header is the line of text at the top of each page usually written in large, bold font. Use keywords in your page headers as well as the text on that page, but make sure to make the headers reader friendly.
Add content to your site
Add new content regularly. Google likes to see a website that is “fresh,” indicating that the site is active.
Use real text, not images
Use text instead of images. “Chicago Mortgage Broker Deb Milner” in fancy type embedded into your home page as an image cannot be crawled by the spiders. Always use text.
Optimization training
There is some excellent SEO training at www.lynda.com. It costs $25 per month to be a member, but you can cancel after the training. It’s time well-invested.
Last thoughts
Be careful to pay for optimization training. A lot of SEOs use “black hat” techniques to get your site ranked high in the search engines, but their sketchy tactics could get you penalized or even banned from Google. If you want to pay for SEO, consider using www.websearchengineer.com, the website of Richard John Jenkins. He is a “white hat” SEO who does good work.
I have a list of 7,500 mortgage keywords. If anyone wants it, email me. You can do an edit/find to sift out the keywords relevant to your local area. Then you can run those keywords through the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) to see which keywords to build your pages titles and content around.
If you want to hire someone to help you make these changes or fix your code, I recommend http://www.katasidy.com/. They do a great job at a reasonable price. You would be surprised at how much you can get done for a very small investment.
Posted by: Wade Young| Denver, CO
Mortgage Industry Professionals. Like what you see?
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
That is about as comprehensive and complete of a list as I have seen! Wow!
Do you know of anything that I left off? Obviously the analytics tools that you mentioned (MyBlogLog, Sitemeter, and HitTail) are a factor in putting the SEO puzzle together. If you think of something else that I left off, let me know.
I agree with the majority of your article except for your backlink strategy. I’ve submitted many ‘on-topic’ articles to ezinearticles.com and while they do generate traffic I’ve had no luck with SE’s indexing these as ‘back links’ ( mainly google).Ezinearticles.com is a quality article site so my only conclusion is that google doesn’t see these as valid links.If it was I would have at least 40 quality backlinks pointing at several pages within my domain and be ranking much higher for my selected keywords. I hope I’m wrong and google eventually indexes quality directory links. Maybe it just takes a while? Most of my articles are between 1-5 months old. Anyway very helpful article!
Leslie-
Google is showing my ezine articles as back links, and my ezine articles aren’t that old. I don’t know what to tell you about why they aren’t showing up for you. They are showing up very clearly in Webmaster Tools. Sorry for your bad luck. My first ezine was published 11-15-07. Funny thing, though. They don’t show up when I do a link: mysite.com in the Google search box. They do, however, show up in Webmaster Tools. Have you checked in Webmaster Tools?
I’ve been really focusing on the directories. But I really need to expend my tactics.
Thanks for the great article.
Very interesting..thanks for the tip to use “webmaster tools”, I actually never used it ( I registred my sites there and went through it) …and I noticed similar results. One of my other sites was showing all the ezine articles postings ( about 9-10 articles) when I checked the external link monitor portion. However, none of the articles linking to pages at http://www.ez-mortgage-calculator.net were included when I checked the external link monitor. It seems really inconsistant because many of the articles for the mortgage site show up in google for the specific targeted keyword that I based the article on.
We are experiencing similar when you mention no links are being returned when you do a link:”my-site.url”. Wonder why they show in webmaster tools but not in - link:”mysite.url” will look into this…
Anyway,the articles bring traffic but the goal of the article and link is a bump up for web pages on the actual domain that have that keyword.
Thanks for the response !
Leslie-
For some reason, Google doesn’t like to play their hand for everyone to see. That is why the search results are inconsistent. From what I have read, Google sees EVERYTHING. Even if your links don’t show up in the link checkers, Google still sees them. I would just keep linking and forget about the link checkers. As long as the site is “no follow,” your links will count even if you cannot see them.
Thanks Wade,
Good advice…that’s the plan, articles and link partners.
I have also been on the lookout for more ‘industry specific’ article directories to submit articles; those relating more towards the mortgage business. Any ideas on that ?
Thanks for the advice again!
You can buy links. They might just be devalued if they’re blatantly obvious, like if they follow a sponsors section. The selling site might also lose PageRank. You can’t hurt your site by buying links, because if that were the case, you could buy blatantly for your competition and hurt their sites.
Here is a question and answer posed to Matt Cutts, the Google big shot:
“I’m worried that someone will buy links to my site and then report that.”
Short answer: Manual processing, no automation to prevent that
Here is another quote by Matt Cutts:
“The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by choice.”
We can assume from Matt’s comments that Google is trying like mad to adjust their algorithm so that paid links do not distort search results. If a site builds their ranking through paid links, once the Google algorithm is updated, that ranking will vanish. Better to take the slow and steady route, building links organically so that your site never gets the boot by Google.
Lastly, Google does not have to be fair. They are looking to return relevant search results to searchers; their highest aim isn’t to be fair. They are a big corporation whose aim is to make billions. Not that many companies are going to buy links to squash their competitor’s rankings. Google knows that. They have also admitted to adjusting rankings manually. When their algorithm is adjusted to lower the boom on paid links, they will no doubt have to adjust manually for unscrupulous companies who try to buy links for their competitors. Maybe Congress will have to enact an “opt-out” list for Internet links, meaning if you don’t want a link from that site that they have to remove the link to your site just like they do in no call lists. They would settle the paid links by competitors issue. In my opinion, paid links are dangerous because of what changes are to come in the future in terms of Google’s algorithm.
Can you please email me the list of 7500 keywords?
Very nice artical, thank you so much.
jay@getlocalbroker.com
Can you please email me the list of 7500 keywords?
Very nice artical, thank you so much.
I’d so appreciate it if you would shoot me over that list of keywords. I’m super impressed with the amount of information I’ve learned through your article. Thanks!
Wade, this is excellent information! Glad you shared it on Wanna Network!
Thanks!
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