SEO is a hot topic in insurance circles right now. There is a lot of discussion about insurance agency websites and competing with insurance carriers, direct writers and insurance lead aggregators. It seems like I get at least an email per day from a firm promising to increase my ranking in natural search results.
Aside from the basic website structure and key placement of words and phrases in URLs and headers, there are only a couple of ways to increase your organic search ranking. You can buy links, or create content. Buying links is definitely the quick solution. Once you are connected to a “Link Farm” you can instantly improve your ranking in organic search results. However this is not without risk because if the search engine determines your back links are not relevant you could blacklisted as a link spammer which will hurt your site’s and your reputation and take quite awhile to undo. Not to mention losing any ranking advantage you previously enjoyed.
A better, more long-lasting, and compliant method is to provide content. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all LOVE content. That’s because the search engines are more concerned with our experience as consumers than as advertisers. Delivering high quality, relevant search results is paramount to their success. By writing articles and submitting them to article directories, blogs, and social networking sites, and then linking them back to your website, you increase the number of links back to your site and your organic search results, but you also increase the likelihood that you will come up in more than one spot on the search results page which will exponentially increase the chances that one of your results will be clicked. If you have any SEO tips you want share, or if you disagree with any of my comments please post. I’d love to hear from you.