Insurance Agent Sales Lead Generation Tips

Canonical URL Tag and SEO

Saturday, April 30th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

If a search engine can reach the same page using different URLs, it can fail to give the page the ranking that it deserves.

Per Wikipedia,

“URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner.”

You may be asking “what does that mean” or “what does that have to do with getting more traffic on my website and more money in my pocket?”

Why? Let’s pretend that John F. Kennedy was a write-in candidate when he ran for president against Nixon. If half of the people voted for “John Kennedy” and the other half voted for “John .F Kennedy” he could have come in second (and third) if no one consolidated his votes.

A similar issue can happen with your web pages.

The following URLs will get you to the same destination:

http://www.lovetherates.com
http://www.lovetherates.com/index.htm
http://lovetherates.com/index.htm

They could be separate pages with separate content, but they are not. If the back links that the page gets aren’t all credited to the same canonical version, the page faces the same problem that JFK had in our example.

How do you fix this? The steps are simple, but can be time consuming if you have a lot of pages on your site and don’t have some kind if CMS.

Pick one canonical version

Modify the following code with the appropriate URL for each page

<link rel="canonical" href="http://lovetherates.com/index.htm"/>

Place in the code in the <head></head> section of each page

If you have a small site, this will be easy to do manually. However, if you have a larger site, you may want to use code to do the job for you. This works best if you have a template, but has its advantages even if you don’t. Once the code is installed, you can copy a page, change the body text, and have the correct canonical tag show up automatically for its new URL.

The following solution assumes that you have PHP enabled on your pages.

Place the following code either in the portion of your template that stores the global functions called on every page (or place it in the <head></head> section of each page).

function generate_canonical_tag_text()
 {

$this_file = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];

$canonical_prefix = 'http://mysite.com';

$canonical_tag = <<<EOT

<link rel="canonical" href="$canonical_prefix$this_file"/>

EOT;

return($canonical_tag_text);

When modifying the code be sure to:

use single quotes around http://mysite.com. The code will not work if you use regular double quotes.
There should be no spaces on the same line before or after the following lines of code:
- $canonical_tag = <<<EOT
- EOT;

Using Exact Match to Predict Traffic

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

Search engine optimization starts with keywords. Because of that, SEOs will often try to predict the amount of traffic that a given keyword will generate.

The most popular tool used to estimate traffic is Google’s keyword tool. Novices often use this tool without changing the defaults. This usually results in highly inflated counts.

Google’s keyword tool will use “broad match” by default. This means that the keyword you entered will be matched with queries that Google thinks are similar as well as queries that are exactly the same.

Most experts will suggest that you use “exact match” instead. Using this setting means that the keyword you entered will be matched only with queries that are exactly the same. (Differences in capitalization are ignored.)

Using this setting will give you a much better count. However, it is far from perfect.

At best using the “exact match” setting when using Google’s keyword tool is like using a carrot to measure the height of two people. If you know that I am 12 carrots tall and that you are 14 carrots tall we know which one of is taller. (This assumes that we use the same carrot. LOL.) However, we won’t necessarily know how to convert our height from carrots to inches or meters.

In another words, if one keyword shows a count of 100 and another shows a count of 500, the one with a count of 500 probably generates more traffic. However the real number may be far from 500.

Why? Google uses a complex algorithm to match keywords and queries when you use their search engine. A page that targets Connecticut health insurance may also rank for “Connecticut health insurance policies,” “health insurance in Connecticut,” and “Connecticut medical insurance” even if those precise phrases are nowhere to be found on the page.

Conversely, a site that targets “Connecticut medical insurance” may get ranked for “Connecticut health insurance” and thereby lower the available spots in the SERPs.

Ultimately the best predictor of how much traffic a keyword will generate is the data you generate yourself. If you know how to mine your own data you can determine how much traffic and conversions you get from each keyword. This can more accurately help you predict the amount of traffic you will get if you move up or down in the SERPs.

Along the way you will probably find that you get a moderate amount of traffic from keywords that have zero traffic according to Google’s tool. Some of that traffic will come from Yahoo! but some will be Google traffic.

I use keyword tools on a daily basis. They are indispensable. However, you can’t take the numbers they spit out as gospel. There are many reasons for this besides the ones mentioned above.

A keyword tool is like a 20 year-old road map. The basic layout of most cities doesn’t change much over twenty years so it is still a useful tool, especially if a current map isn’t available.

Placing too much faith in an old map or a new keyword tool can lead you down a dead end. Keep your eyes open and don’t expect any SEO tool to give you all the answers.

Latent Semantic Indexing – Beyond Simple Keyword Lists

Saturday, February 26th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

There are only ten spots on the first page of Google or Yahoo!. This means that you may have to go beyond just putting your keyword on your page in the appropriate places.

If all that mattered was the keywords you got from your basic keyword research, you could just take one of your kid’s book reports and just stick your keyword in every so many words. Of course doing so won’t make your visitors want to take action. And you won’t get too many visitors in the first place because a page on your website or a post on your blog like that you won’t fool Google.

This won’t fool Google into sending you free clicks to your site for at least two reasons. Randomly splicing in words from a keyword list isn’t likely to result in a document that is grammatically correct. The second reason is Google won’t see the other complementary terms it expects to see.

(Spell checking and grammar checking are now an SEO tasks. Your website’s pages will get demerits for each misspelling and grammatical error. This may not be a major factor, but you never know what little thing will move a blog post from the top of page two to the bottom of page one.)

If you write an article about school, Google expects to see words that are semantically-related. Semantically related doesn’t just mean words that are synonymous like “student” and “pupil.” It also means words that are related like student “classroom” and “desk.”

If a first tier search engine sees none of the other words it expects to see it will assume that your website’s page isn’t really about that phrase. You can throw your links, your keyword research and your keyword list out the window if you don’t include some of those other phrases in your content.

I could use the phrase “as crooked as Nixon” in my title tag, but never get a click from Google for any search related to that person if I never use any words that are semantically related to him. (Anyone searching for information on that guy certainly doesn’t want to see this page.)

If you write naturally, you will automatically use a lot of semantically-related words. Writing for your human visitors is the best way to write for the search engines.

However just doing that won’t maximize your SEO value. You will get fewer clicks to your website from the search engines unless you also edit your copy to make it more attractive to the search engine’s spiders also.

Without using an LSI tool, you may miss some that could really boost your page’s ranking in the SERPs. I use one for most of my blog posts on my various sites.

My blog writing system includes doing a little keyword research to come up with a phrase for my title tags and my h1 tag. Then I write the post. I let my LSI tool run in the background. Then I use the LSI keyword list to help me enhance the SEO value of my post.

(I use an LSI tool that is part of a suite of SEO tools. One of the other tools in the suite no longer works and I’m more than a little ticked at the customer disservice I’ve received, so I can’t recommend an LSI tool at this time.)

However, there are several free or inexpensive programs that will generate a nice semantically-related keyword lists that you can use when you write for your site. You could generate a free LSI keyword list manually, but since the tools are cheap, it would be much more time consuming than it is worth.

What the tools do is search Google using the keyword you enter and then see which words are repeated on the most highly ranked pages.

If your keyword is “health insurance” you can expect that “health” and “insurance” are going to be on any high ranking page for that search. You might also expect that “medical,” “coverage” and “deductible” will be on all or most of the website pages as well.

“Home” and “blog” are going to be on many of those pages as well. However, “home” may be on the link to the home pages. “Blog” may be there because many of the pages will be blogs. You will have to use common sense to get the most from any SEO tool.

Generating keyword lists from a tool like WordTracker or some another keyword tool is an essential starting point of marketing your website. Everything about marketing your site starts with keywords. However, if you are in a competitive market, you will also need to use a latent semantic indexing tool as well.

Finding the Best Search Engine Optimization Services Provider

Saturday, February 19th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

Finding a good search engine optimization provider is not an easy task. If you know enough about SEO to ask all the right questions and understand the answers, you probably don’t need anyone to do your SEO. The data you need to verify whether or not an SEO firm has done a good job is hard to get directly and is easy to forge.

As far as I know there is no such thing as a degree in Search Engine Optimization. Although SEO may be taught in some colleges, most SEOs develop their skills through trial and error, books and seminars. This makes it hard to look at a person’s college transcript to determine whether or not they can do a good job for you.

Further I think that there are many more people that can talk about the Internet marketing and search engine optimization a lot better than they can do search engine optimization. Some can make your eyes glaze over with discussions of inbound link building strategies, directory submissions and article marketing. Many who can talk the talk have had very little success marketing on the Internet.

Quality is so much more important than quantity in the online world. It is easy to create a volume of content and get a lot of links. However, it is difficult to create quality content and links that matter.

The bottom line is their track record of helping clients get better Google and Yahoo! rankings and (more importantly) increasing the quality traffic they receive online. However, unless you are able to have access to a site’s analytics and understand the data you will probably need to rely on recommendations from those who have used their services in the past. (I wouldn’t let anyone see my site’s analytics and wouldn’t expect to be able to look at anyone else’s.)

There are websites like Alexa.com that claim to be able to provide you with data about the popularity of a website. In theory you could use Alexa.com date to determine whether how much a traffic a site got before and after someone did SEO work.

However, since a lot of Alexa’s data is based on how many visitors a site received from people who have the Alexa tool bar it can be grossly inaccurate. It probably works well to see trends on top websites, but for smaller sites that get less than 50,000 visitors a month, the data doesn’t seem to be very accurate. Do you have the Alexa tool bar installed on your browser? Case closed.

My first recommendation is talk with one or more of the satisfied clients of any SEO firm that you are considering. Although you aren’t likely to be able to view any data that proves that the SEO firm can do a good job for you, this brings you a little closer to that goal.

My second recommendation is to be careful with any firm that was given anything less than a strong endorsement from your mother (assuming your Mom has a website). Give them a small project and see how well effective their SEO services are at moving your Yahoo! and Google rankings closer to the top and increasing online traffic that converts. Then consider giving them a bigger project.

Don’t expect increases in traffic overnight. Search engine optimization rarely works quickly. However, have a measurable goal that the firm has to meet to earn more business from you.

What is a Key Word?

Saturday, February 12th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

The last two posts were about key words and key word tools, but I failed to answer the question “What is a key word?” I’ll try to give you that information now.

A key word (or “keyword”) is word or phrase that search engines look for when they try to match a search query with the most relevant web pages.

There are technical distinctions between keywords and search queries although the terms are often used interchangeably. A search query is the term that a searcher types into a search engine’s form. A keyword is the term that the search engines’ algorithm decides best matches the query. This means that the text “NJ house insurance” may match the keyword “New Jersey home insurance.” (The text on your website doesn’t have to exactly match the search query although the closer the match, the better.)

The most important thing to remember, however is that Google, Yahoo! MSN, etc. tries to match search queries with the most relevant blog posts, online articles and other web pages. If the words and phrases that you use in your on page ad off page optimization are closer to those queries, you will get more traffic.

(On page optimization is the art and science of weaving keywords into the text of your online content. Off line optimization is the art of getting high quality links that point to pages on your website.)

Knowing how often people type in “health insurance” and how often the type in “medical insurance” is important. It is also important to know what online content competes for each query or search term.

In order to find this information efficiently, we need to use tools for our research like key word spy, the Google key word tool and the WordTracker key word tool. These tools can generate lists of keywords to help you get more traffic for your web pages, blog posts and articles much easier.

I’ve Got My Long Tail Keywords, Now What?

Saturday, February 5th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

So now you have a list of long tail keywords and are wondering what you should do with them in order to make some money. Whether you are using a combination of key word spy, the keyword tool from Google and Wordtracker to do your long tail keyword research like I do or some other tool or tools you need to know what to do next.

There are three ways to use the long tail keywords and other keywords you want to get web traffic from. You can use them in on-page optimization, off-page optimization and what I call “off-off-page optimization.”

Using Keywords in On-Page Optimization

This post will focus on on-page optimization. This is the art and science of designing your web page or blog post so that Google, Yahoo! MSN and the other search engines rank your page well for the search phrase or phrases you target.

A well-designed web page will serve several masters; you need to be a marketer and not just a person who optimizes for the search engines. Each page or post needs that you put online to be attractive to humans (and make them click where you want them to), have useful content and be attractive to search engines.

Although you can target multiple keywords on a single page, each page should have one main keyword that it targets.

You can use your exact keyword multiple times on the page, but you should also target similar keywords. For example if “private health insurance” is an important keyword for you, you should also use similar phrases such as private medical insurance and “health insurance for individuals” on your page.

If your copy reads well then chances are you haven’t overused your keyword. This is the guideline I use. Use synonyms and semantically related words whenever you fell that you have overused your keyword.

Don’t use a keyword without modification if you can’t make it part of a grammatically-correct and logical sentence. Since your keyword is going to be seen by your human visitors as well as the search engines bots, you will often have to add additional words or even rearrange the words.

Long Tail Keywords and Title Tags

The first place and most important place for your keywords is your title tag. The title tag is found in the head section of your HTML code. Your title tag should look something like this:

<title>The Keyword I’m Targeting</title>

Try to keep the text in your title tags under 72 characters. This includes spaces but does not include the opening or closing tag. Experts differ on how long your title should be, but must put the maximum between 64 characters and 75 characters.

Long Tail Keywords and The H1 Tag

The second place to put your keywords is in the headline of your web page or blog post. This has traditionally been the text in the H1 tag. Your H1 tag should be in the body of your document and should look something like this:

<h1>The Keyword I’m Targeting</h1>

This text should be at the top of your page. It will be the first thing that most visitors will see. It needs to do double duty. It needs to sell the visitor on reading further and also should tell the search engines what your page is about.

You will probably need to modify your keyword, but when you do so try to keep the original keyword as close as possible to the beginning of the tag.

(In WordPress your blog post’s name automatically populates an h1 tag.)

Long Tail Keywords in Outbound Links

The third place to put your keywords is in anchor text of an outbound link. Anchor text is the text that you click on in a hyper link.

The link can be to a page on your website or to another site. If you link to pages outside of your website consider linking to a high authority sites. Government sites can be good to link to.

Long Tail Keywords and Text with Special Formatting

The fourth place to place your keyword is in the text with special formatting. Text that is boldface or italicized carries a little more weight with the search engines. They use this text to as clues to determine what your page is about.

Long Tail Keywords and Regular Body Text

The fifth place is just regular body text. You can sprinkle your keyword in the body of your webpage.

We will talk about how to use keywords in off page optimization in my next blog post.

Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker and SpyFu

Saturday, January 29th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

One way to build your traffic for your website is to try to get ranked for keywords that have decent volume, but low competition. It is hard to out SEO the big boys and girls, but if you can find enough “long tail keywords” you can increase your traffic and make more money.

I use three keyword tools on a regular basis. Each tool has its strength.

The keyword tools that I use are:

Google’s keyword tool
WordTracker
Spyfu

I use the keyword tool that is part of Google’s pay per click program Adsense frequently. It is an important part of my SEO arsenal.

There are two reasons why I like the tool. The first is that it uses Google’s database. This is important, but it isn’t the main reason I use the tool today. (There is now an option with WordTracker to use Google’s data.) The main reason that I use the tool is the fact that it can generate a list that includes synonyms and semantically related words.

You can type “car insurance” into the tool and get back keywords that include “auto insurance” and “truck insurance.” This makes it a lot easier to find the right keyword when you want to add a new page to your website.

What I don’t like about the tool is that although it tells you how many searches there are for a given keyword and competitive a keyword is for pay-per-click it doesn’t give any data to help you determine how competitive the keyword is for organic search.

This is where WordTracker comes in. It does a good job of telling you how competitive a keyword is. You can take the list you generated from the Google keyword tool and get the missing organic data. Just be sure to select the option that uses Google’s database.

You can also type in a keyword and have it generate a list for you that includes the number of monthly searches for each keyword. However, unlike the Google tool it won’t show you any keywords that include any synonyms or semantically related words (unless those keywords also include the seed phrase you typed in). If you type in “auto insurance” you will only get keywords that include “auto insurance.”

Another really cool thing about WordTracker is the information available in their videos and in the “WordTracker Academy.” You can find a ton of tips on Wordtracker’s website that will help you SEO your website whether or not you use their tool.

Spyfu allows you to “spy” on your competition. It can tell you what keywords they rank for organically and what keywords they bid for on PPC. This data can be very valuable. Your competition may be bidding on keywords that you should be as well.

Spyfu is especially useful if you want to do SEO for a niche that you are unfamiliar with. Trying to use a thesaurus can help, but knowing what keywords your competitors are bidding on can help you start at step 5 instead of step 1.

I use these keyword tools to find keywords to target when I create new content for my websites. I create a new blog post, video or page almost every day and will almost invariably use WordTracker or one of the other tools before I write the first word of my content.

I work on several websites and therefore can justify paying for all three tools. If you are starting out in SEO or SEO is a sideline you may want to use the following strategy.

Open a Google Adwords advertiser account with the minimum deposit to get access to their keyword tool
Try Wordtracker’s risk free trial. If you like it, go for the annual subscription.
Try SpyFu‘s free version. You can get a lot from the free version.

If you are serious about increasing your organic traffic, you will need better data than you can get from free keyword tools. The tools I mentioned above aren’t the only good tools, but they are the ones that I use on a regular basis.

Best Search Engines for PPC

Monday, January 24th, 2011 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

Chance are you Google as your primary search engine, but are aware of Yahoo! and MSN. They aren’t the only search engines, however. There are hundreds of search engines out there.

Many of them offer advertising that you can pay for on a pay per click basis. This means that you don’t pay based on the number of people who see your advertisement. You pay based on the number of clicks you get on your advertisement.

If you have had success with pay per click (PPC), you may be interested in expanding into another PPC engine to expose your ads to another market. If you have had success with Google’s program you may want to try MSN’s program or one of the other services.

This is a perfectly logical thought. Unfortunately, only a very few PPC engines work. Many will tell you how their bids per click are so much lower than the AdWords clicks. This information is usually true.

The problem is that although clicks are cheap, the conversions are very expensive most of the time. Paying ten cents a click sounds like a bargain when you are used to paying a dollar a click. However, your profit isn’t driven by how many clicks you get, but by how many purchases or leads you get.

I have been using PPC since 2004 and have used not only AdWords, but Yahoo!, MSN’s program and many others. (To advertise on Yahoo! you must use the MSN product now.)

PPC still works, but there is more competition today. I get more leads via my SEO efforts today. For most people who are successful with SEO, it is a cheaper alternative in the long run, but it takes a while to see a return.

If you have a well thought-out website and advertising strategy, you can make a profit with PPC if you stick with the two major PPC programs. However, you will have to test ten or twenty of the smaller engines to find one that will give you a good ROI.

If you do decide to test any PPC program, be sure to test constantly limit your daily or monthly budget. Also be sure to monitor your results on an ongoing basis. Programs that make you a profit today may not do so next month.

Using Paid & Free Downloadable Clip Art Scientifically To Sell More

Monday, November 29th, 2010 | Website Marketing | Alston

ShareThis

When designing your web pages, the judicious use of color and pictures can make a big difference. The right picture in the right place can double your conversion rates and can more than double your profits.

However, knowing whether a picture adds or subtracts from your profits requires testing. Fortunately adding adding graphics and testing your web pages is both easy and inexpensive.

You can get free downloadable clip art from various sites on the internet. If you do, be sure that you get graphics that you can use legally.

While you can get royalty-free clip art free, I use a paid service. Using iCLIPART.com for downloadable clip art can save you a lot of time.

The graphics are much better organized than those on a typical free clip art website. The selection is huge. This keeps me from to hunting all over the Internet looking for pictures that meet my needs and that are royalty-free.

Using pictures and graphics are important, but if your goal is to make more money, you need to test your ideas. Pretty websites don’t always make more money!

Most of us use some form of HIPPO or highest paid person’s opinion to help us design our websites. This doesn’t always work.

I will often ask my wife what she thinks. Although I listen to her opinion in all things, the final judge of whether this version of a web page is better than that version is based on the collective opinions of the visitors.

Google Website Optimizer is the tool that I use to determine whether version A is better than version B. This is not only a great tool for A/B testing, but it is a great tool for multivariate testing. And it is free!

If you aren’t using Google Website Optimizer or something similar, you are losing money! I can’t state that too strongly. Depending on one person’s opinion to tell you whether a web page will make you more money is a very risky proposition.

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer is a great guide to help you get the most out of Google Website Optimizer.

Tags: clip art free, SEO books

How to Change Your Post or Page Title in WordPress

Sunday, November 21st, 2010 | Insurance Sales Leads | Alston

ShareThis

There are only a few things that I don’t like about WordPress. One is the fact that by default the name of your blog prepends the name of each blog post in each title tag. This can hurt your ability to rank for your keywords.

You can fix this in one of two ways. You make the name of your blog a keyword that you want to rank for or you can hack into the code.

If you decide to rename your blog, be sure to name it something short. You’ve still only got 70 or so characters to work with and the name of your blog will take of some of the character allotment you have for each blog post’s title tag.

If you know how to code in PHP this is a quick hack. You start by looking for a file called “header.php” in the folder that houses your current theme. This will be a subfolder of “../wp-content/themes”

First make a copy of the file and save it just in case. Then look for the title tag (“”). After that, but before “” you should find ” bloginfo(‘name’);” several times.

This is the function that prints the name of the blog. It should be part of an if/then construct. The if/then construct is designed to print give you different titles for different types of pages, such as single blog posts and category pages.

You can delete or comment out the function selectively.

I believe that there are plug-ins that can do this hack for you, but I can’t recommend any since I haven’t used them.

Tags: title tags

« Previous posts

Many of companies whose products I endorse will compensate me if you make a purchase. I do not buy leads because I generate them from my websites, but I use most of the other products and services on a regular basis and they have added to my bottom line.
Alston J. Balkcom

Sales Lead Tips