Being number one is not all its cracked up to be.

I was in a meeting the other day. A room full of insurance agents. The agent next to me proudly announced that his website was now number one on Google. Number one for what?! What search phrase would we have to use to find his site? I didn’t want to burst his bubble so I let him go. My guess and I would be willing to put money on this, the search phrase included his name. How many visitors do you think he is getting to his site from people searching Google by his name? Maybe 5 a month if he is lucky? Probably all 5 of those visitors are existing customers. By no means am I trying to say that ranking high in Google search results is a waste of time. What I am saying is that you need to understand what people search for. Lets say you have an insurance agency in Jacksonville Florida. If you managed to get your website to rank number one for the search result, “insurance in Jacksonville Florida”, how many visitors per month would you expect AND heres the best part – how many of those visitors would be qualified leads? Just think about it for a second. Someone is searching for insurance in the town where you have your agency.So by now you’re probably asking the most important question, “How do I get my website ranked number one for an important search phrase?” I’m not going to say this is easy. Its not. The work that is involved is called search engine optimization or SEO. Larger companies now hire firms to handle this work.

Lets take a second to think like a search engine. When someone visits our search tool and searches for something, how do we decide out of the billions of websites, which to rank the highest? While the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and others) keep their formulas a secret, common sense gives us a basic idea of what this formula looks like. A search engine wants to provide the most relavent, highest quality sites first. In order to achieve this they find sites that have the most links from other sites linking to them. They look at the title of your site, the content or words that you have on the page. They look to see if your site has been updated recently so the info is still valid. There is a lot more that goes into the formula, but having a basic idea is a big start. Having links from other websites point to your site says to the search engines that another website values your content. Thats why its critical to build links to your site. Ask your customers, vendors and anyone inside your network to place a link to your website on their site. Here are some additional ways to add links to your website:

• Write an article for another site including a link back to your site in the article.
• Write an online press release with your link in it.
• Submit your link to online business directories. (such as FindLocalInsurance.com)
• Use social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Include your link in your profile.

By having all of these links from other websites you’ll not only rank higher on Google, you’ll also gather additional visitors to your site from people clicking those links.

Now consider your website content. The search engines are looking to match search phrases with those websites that most clearly give that content. Be sure to include the words in your content that your prospects would be searching for.

Lastly, avoid scams from shady online businesses and telemarketers that promise to get your website ranked number one. Always ask for references.