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Insurance Forums
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If anyone is interested, here are a few tips and points for SEO and driving traffic to your insurance website.
1. It is a myth that you cannot rank well and get decent traffic to your site just because the big boys spend millions on SEO. It is very possible to drive enough traffic to your website to supplement or even make an entire living off of. This myth mentality is harmful because it discourages you from getting started and plugging away.
2. Before you get started with offsite seo such as link building/blog commenting/social networking etc... you MUST do a good job with your onsite SEO. This means having the correct title tags, H1 and H2 tags, having a strong meta description (Not meta tags, but description), having some decent keyword density for your search terms and having lots of content. This is the best way (Aside from content) that you indicate to the search engines exactly what your site is about.
3. The single best thing you can do for your website is to have a blog on a subdomain of the website that you write consistently on. Wordpress will allow you to redirect for 10 or 15 bucks a year and you can have a blog at [url=http://www.blog.baltimorehealthinsurance dotcom or whatever your site is. You must write directly toward what your target audience is looking for. If you sell auto insurance in Nevada, then you need to ask yourself 50 questions of what someone who is looking to buy that coverage would want to know... these are the same questions that you get asked every day by your clients. Start posting them and answering them one by one. This content will be vital for long tail keyword rankings.
Post frequently and make sure that you never write something that will turn off all your clients of they were to see it. You are not looking to just bring them to the site and have them fill out a lead generation form. You want to build trust, have them forward the links to others, have them pick up the phone and call you etc... To do this, you need content content and more content.
Define yourself locally. Write about local insurance events and local streets and neighborhoods. Write up case studies of people who you have helped. Ask permission first, but trust me, people love the recognition. You write a review of what a pleasant customer that Mrs. Smith was and how she was so educated, and she will send the link to her 10 friends. Guess what, those friends all want to buy insurance from someone who recognizes and appreciates their clients.
It is not so hard to establish yourself as the local authority on your lines of insurance, as long as you follow these steps. I can't stress enough, you need to make it local. Talk about where you grew up, the school you went to, the shops you shop at.
Send a link to the blog to every lead you have ever bought, local or not. Keep a link to it in your signature and make sure it is in every email you send. This is a natural boost to your reading audience and you can convert plenty of leads who will "get to know you".
Never post without rereading it twice. These are not posts for your friends, but for future clients, and you want to make sure that don't see the nasty side of you.
Now you are ready to build links. Incidentally, having links in your signature on a forum will usually not help much. It will help you get indexed, but if you have 1000 posts, then that is 1000 links to your site from the same website, and they all get discounted. The conventional wisdon is now that run of site links or close to it, do not help nearly as much as a few well placed links. That is why it is far better to get your links into actual posts then in a signature.
Also, to correct something I have seen written here, your links on our site to your site do not help our rankings. Outbound links only help if they are to trusted and older sites, and even that is debatable.
There is no magic to building links. It takes hard work and time. The best way to build links is to find the sites that rank well for your keywords and run a link search on them. To run a search on yahoo (Which gives more results that google) just put it the following text into the search bar, replacing this site with any site you want to run a link report on. linkdomain:insurance-forums.net -site:insurance-forums.net
This will show you who is linking to the top sites, and those are the best places to start getting links from.
Commenting on blogs, forums, social media sites are all good ways to get some additional backlinks. If you write a positive review of a health insurance resource site on your blog and then send a link to the owner, that is a good way to get a strong backlink. Hard work, but rinse and repeat and it definitely works.
You should also apply for a DMOZ listing. It doesn't help as much as it used to, but it does help. I am pretty sure that two of our members are even editors there!
I got to go back to work, maybe later I will supplement with some additional ideas focusing on keyword research and identifying potential link sources.
Happy Hunting and remember, the real key is not to give up. Keep at it and it is guaranteed to work.
1. It is a myth that you cannot rank well and get decent traffic to your site just because the big boys spend millions on SEO. It is very possible to drive enough traffic to your website to supplement or even make an entire living off of. This myth mentality is harmful because it discourages you from getting started and plugging away.
2. Before you get started with offsite seo such as link building/blog commenting/social networking etc... you MUST do a good job with your onsite SEO. This means having the correct title tags, H1 and H2 tags, having a strong meta description (Not meta tags, but description), having some decent keyword density for your search terms and having lots of content. This is the best way (Aside from content) that you indicate to the search engines exactly what your site is about.
3. The single best thing you can do for your website is to have a blog on a subdomain of the website that you write consistently on. Wordpress will allow you to redirect for 10 or 15 bucks a year and you can have a blog at [url=http://www.blog.baltimorehealthinsurance dotcom or whatever your site is. You must write directly toward what your target audience is looking for. If you sell auto insurance in Nevada, then you need to ask yourself 50 questions of what someone who is looking to buy that coverage would want to know... these are the same questions that you get asked every day by your clients. Start posting them and answering them one by one. This content will be vital for long tail keyword rankings.
Post frequently and make sure that you never write something that will turn off all your clients of they were to see it. You are not looking to just bring them to the site and have them fill out a lead generation form. You want to build trust, have them forward the links to others, have them pick up the phone and call you etc... To do this, you need content content and more content.
Define yourself locally. Write about local insurance events and local streets and neighborhoods. Write up case studies of people who you have helped. Ask permission first, but trust me, people love the recognition. You write a review of what a pleasant customer that Mrs. Smith was and how she was so educated, and she will send the link to her 10 friends. Guess what, those friends all want to buy insurance from someone who recognizes and appreciates their clients.
It is not so hard to establish yourself as the local authority on your lines of insurance, as long as you follow these steps. I can't stress enough, you need to make it local. Talk about where you grew up, the school you went to, the shops you shop at.
Send a link to the blog to every lead you have ever bought, local or not. Keep a link to it in your signature and make sure it is in every email you send. This is a natural boost to your reading audience and you can convert plenty of leads who will "get to know you".
Never post without rereading it twice. These are not posts for your friends, but for future clients, and you want to make sure that don't see the nasty side of you.
Now you are ready to build links. Incidentally, having links in your signature on a forum will usually not help much. It will help you get indexed, but if you have 1000 posts, then that is 1000 links to your site from the same website, and they all get discounted. The conventional wisdon is now that run of site links or close to it, do not help nearly as much as a few well placed links. That is why it is far better to get your links into actual posts then in a signature.
Also, to correct something I have seen written here, your links on our site to your site do not help our rankings. Outbound links only help if they are to trusted and older sites, and even that is debatable.
There is no magic to building links. It takes hard work and time. The best way to build links is to find the sites that rank well for your keywords and run a link search on them. To run a search on yahoo (Which gives more results that google) just put it the following text into the search bar, replacing this site with any site you want to run a link report on. linkdomain:insurance-forums.net -site:insurance-forums.net
This will show you who is linking to the top sites, and those are the best places to start getting links from.
Commenting on blogs, forums, social media sites are all good ways to get some additional backlinks. If you write a positive review of a health insurance resource site on your blog and then send a link to the owner, that is a good way to get a strong backlink. Hard work, but rinse and repeat and it definitely works.
You should also apply for a DMOZ listing. It doesn't help as much as it used to, but it does help. I am pretty sure that two of our members are even editors there!
I got to go back to work, maybe later I will supplement with some additional ideas focusing on keyword research and identifying potential link sources.
Happy Hunting and remember, the real key is not to give up. Keep at it and it is guaranteed to work.
