How To Improve Your Website's Search Engine Rankings The Easy Way
From: Ameen Kamadia
Today I want to talk about how to increase the search engine ranking of your web pages.
Lately, I have been studying this a lot. Many of you have your own web pages, and most of them were bought from third party mortgage website providers. Our company, MoneyTree Mortgage also has a website, which we got from the largest company in the mortgage website industry. I am not going to mention their name because the site is not worth the money.
Anyway, if you don't already know, getting your web site listed high on the search engines is a tough job. Mainly because there is so much competition. And because of this, we are told by the website sellers that we need to do pay-per-click. This is where we pay the search engines to display our ads for keywords we choose and if someone clicks on our ad and goes to our site, we pay the search engine an amount we determine.
Sounds like a great concept. But if you want your ad listed high enough to generate any clicks you will have to compete with all the other mortgage web sites and end up paying $1 or more per click. And that can get very expensive very fast.
So what do we do?
This is a pretty important topic, and that is why I am going to cover it in this month's Millionaire Loan Officer Newsletter.
There are several things we can do. One is to hire a search engine optimization company. But you will probably need a web designer to implement all the changes they request. Even then, there is no guarantee it will work.
The other is to try it yourself: if you have a couple hundred hours to devote to this topic, you might be able to crack the code.
What I did:
We get a lot of traffic at MortgageBrokerTraining.com from our pay-per-click efforts. But we couldn't get into many of the search engines. So I hired a SEO company to help us. Boy, did I learn a lot! It turns out that my web designer had put a code into the design that kept the search engine spiders, (if you don't know what a spider is, I will cover it in this month's newsletter) from indexing the site.
We also updated all our keywords, titles, link titles, alt tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, robots file, and a whole bunch of other complicated things. And so now I think I have a good idea of how you can also improve your rankings.
Here's a quick answer for you:
One of the things I learned, and that everyone agrees, is that the more web sites that link to your web site the better. Google, which accounts for almost half of all web searches, especially places a high value on what they call Link Popularity.
If you have a popular site, that gets a lot of traffic to link to your site, your Link Popularity increases, and your site could move up in the search results. The more links you have the better for you. The trick is to have only related sites link to you. If you have a link to your mortgage site from a dog walking web site, it will not do you much good.
But say you had a link to your site from a mortgage training web site that gets a lot of traffic, like MortgageBrokerTraining.com, that would be very helpful.
And so here is the solution: You link to my website, and I will link to yours. But don't just stop at one link, get other sites to link to yours as well. The more the merrier. There are many sites out there that will link to your site if you just ask. Get your lenders, re agents, title company, appraiser, pest inspection company, and any other vendor you use to link to you. Bribe them with a link, and get one in return.
I just started asking for links, and just today I got four more sites to link to us.
If you would like to participate in MortgageBrokerTraining.com's Link Exchange program, just visit the link exchange page at http://www.mortgagebrokertraining.com/linkexchange.html. Do it right now!
Happy Originating!
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