If you want your online mortgage marketing strategy to work, you’ve got to make sure your online presence is being seen by potential clients and customers.

One of the best ways to do this, is to make sure your website is ranking higher in search engine results than your competitors. This is called SEO (search engine optimization).

If you are new to the concepts of conducting SEO on your mortgage website, the following is a list of 10 items that search engines take into consideration when determining where a mortgage website will show up in search results.

1) Fresh, Unique, and Relevant Content
When Google or any other search engines determines a websites search ranking, they factor in the frequency of fresh, original content. In other words, a site that is consistently being updated or added to is more likely to be ranked higher than a similar website that is rarely updated.

Also, don’t simply plagiarize the work of someone else and pass it off on your website as your own. Search engines are smart, and if they find a ton of duplicate or plagiarized content on your website, your ranking will be penalized.

2) Keywords
This is perhaps one of the most important (and easiest) things you can implement in order to boost your search rankings. Decide which search terms or keywords for which you want your site to rank, and insert them throughout the content on relevant pages in your website.

Caution: Many people think they can simply stuff keywords onto their pages and make their site rank higher. The truth is that Google (and other search engines) are very smart. They know the tricks that people have used in the past, like keyword stuffing, and they now penalize sites that conduct these types of practices.

3) Backlinks
The quality and amount of backlinks (links that come into your website from other credible websites) factor into your search rankings. In the eyes of search engines, a mortgage website with many backlinks is a trustworthy one, and therefore should be ranked higher than a website with no backlinks.

4) Internal Links
Internal links are simply links that go from one page of your website to another, without taking visitors to an external website. Using many internal links in the content of your pages will help boost your rankings. Remember, don’t go too overboard with this one either.

5) Social Media
There almost no doubt that you have heard of the importance of social media by now. Creating content on your website that can easily be shared on social media is a great way to get people to pass around the information you are presenting, and therefore drive more people back to your website.

It has also been shown that having a strong social media presence that consistently drives visitors back to your website has a positive effect on your credibility, and therefore increases your search rankings.

6) Page URLs
For those who might not know, a URL is the address of your website’s pages. For example:

www.YourWebsiteHere.com would be the URL for your homepage. www.YourWebsiteHere.com/example would be the URL for a page called “example”.

Creating a URL structure that incorporates your target keywords is a great way to increase search rankings. Avoid using symbols, numbers, or other characters in your URLs.

7) Metadata
Meta descriptions, keyword tags, and title tags live in the back end of your mortgage website, or the HTML code. They help tell search engines what your website and pages are about, so that they can be ranked for relevant keyword searches. Including your target keywords in your website’s metadata will help boost your rankings.

8) Loading Speed
The time it takes for your website to load is an important factor not only for search rankings, but for improving visitor experiences. Make sure your website loads fast and doesn’t get bogged down by Flash, JavaScript, or any other unnecessary media.

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