Oh great! A mortgage guy is going to tell me something about search engine optimization, right! Actually, you may well flip that statement around and say "an SEO guy is going to tell me something about mortgages, right!"
Long before I was a full time, seasoned mortgage pro I was a computer science geek and owned one of the first hosting companies in Atlanta. As far back as 1988 I hosted a Mustang BBS service called UWDO and did my best to get my community interested in doing business online. Most BBSs back then were for gamers and porn addicts. UWDO was strictly for business and church.
By the time the WWW came around I had developed online presences for Prodigy and AOL for several customers and welcomed the open format of the Web. In 1994 I got my first copy of Linux and ran a very hacked version of a web server until I found O'Reilly's solution and the rest was history. By 2000 I had 1,300 clients renting space on my servers and had developed fully interactive solutions for companies like Hunter Engineering, SiGARMS, The National Rifle Association and many more. By fully interactive I mean with catalogs, order tracking, customer tracking, automated feedback systems, traffic analysis and reporting and more. Not using third party systems but all developed by hand from scratch between myself and my assistant.
I used all that experience to become one of the top small lenders in Georgia - just combined my two loves. So there is my short resume even though I left out the part where I developed two search engines between 1995 and 1998. Back then we called them indexing engines or search spiders. But that's a longer story! Suffice it to say when we talk about weighted algorithms, Eigenspace, link value and other words I have a firm grasp on the actual functions the code provides to use them.
Enough! Here are the Three Tips
Don't write copy, write for the algorithms. Copy writers fail at writing content for search engine optimization and it is proven regularly. I have a client whose daughter is a fantastic copy writer. She can wordsmith some of the best brochures you have seen in your days. Ocassionally the man will insist the verbiage on his website needs to be more like what she writes so I let them do it. Then we watch their SERP (search engine results page) standings drop until he is out of number one, lower than number five, off the first page.
The last time they tried it their SEO was so bad they sank to number 18 on Google and not listed on Yahoo and Bing. It took me almost a full week to get them back into the top three on all three.
You can only buy your way to the top until your money runs out. Listen, I'm not going to tell you not to buy pay per click advertising from the search engines or anywhere else. What I am going to tell you is that you will only enjoy the success as long as the budget is there. You just thought, "yes but if it's successful I'll just keep doing it." Why??? Why would you do something so insipidly stupid when you can just as easily do the right thing and let the search engines work for you?
I'm sure you've had those phone calls or emails promising you top ranking on all three search engines. Have you ever gone all the way to price with them? I did. For getting my website to number one on FHA Home Loans they wanted $83,000. Per month. I joke not. Funny thing is, at the time, I was number one on Google and in the top five on Yahoo and what at the time was pre-Bing Microsoft (MSN).
Generally for somewhere well south of $5000 or the investment of some time and understanding you can get almost any website to the top 5 or better on real, viable search terms. Not FHA Home Loans but certainly FHA Home Loans in Paduka. Take the time to take some classes and learn the truth about SEO writing and website configuration. Learn the value of back linking and comment marketing.
Blog like there is no tomorrow. Content is king. Fresh content beats old content. Proprietary fresh content cannot be beaten. Nobody can beat fresh, relevant and unique content. Why do you think Wikipedia is consistently top in SERP over even the company or name you are searching for?
>>> GET SOME FUR IN YOUR SEO! <<<<
- Fresh. Wikipedia is constantly updated by the community of contributors. Pages about hot topics are changed multiple times per month, week or even day.
- Unique. Nobody says what Wikipedia says. In fact if you submit information they can locate elsewhere it is disqualified.
- Relevant. Wikipedia pages are only about the topic at hand and any irrelevant information is excluded. There are no banal articles on Wiki because the community will override the lack of relevance.
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