So you want to be #1 in Google? As Mike Grehan (of www.websourced.com) puts it, "Why would Google rank you #1?'. If you can answer that question, you're a long way towards getting ranked.

White hat search engine optimization (SEO) refers to working within the bounds of the search engine's (SE) terms of service. That means giving them what they want - and at the next level, giving consumers what they want. The search engines' job is to give consumers relevant results to searches. Make your site relevant, and it becomes in the search engine's best interests to rank your site. Make your site irrelevant or use techniques specifically intended to bypass the SE's functionality and now you've got the folks at the search engines working their hardest to try and remove your site. That's not to suggest that you can't have good results by doing this, just understand that there are two ways to approach the problem.

For now, we're going to focus on white hat SEO.

Techniques for white hat SEO can be divided into two areas; on page factors and off page factors. Quite simply, on page factors are those things that are actually on your site or your server - text, meta tags, these types of things. Off page factors are things that are not controlled directly by you on your site and most often refer to links pointing at your site.

The first document you need to read is Brett Tabke's 26 steps to 15K a day. You can view it here: www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm as well as a variety of other tools and documents related to white hat SEO.

Overall site design
Once again, I'm going to point you to a tried and true document by Brett Tabke: www.searchengineworld.com/engine/theme_pyramids.htm

Theme pyramids are used to provide a solid design and navigation structure for consumers. I refer to this as building silos. Basically you should create a silo or vertical structure for each section of your website. Not only does this assist with consumer navigation, but it helps the SE's determine various themes inherent in your website.

Internal linking structure
Linking is important, we'll go into more detail shortly. However internal linking is important too. These links are under your direct control and you should take advantage of them.

Once you have your silos built (or theme pyramids as described in the above article), set up the downward linking structure. Higher level items should link to related but more specific pages below them. Make sure you use appropriate link text. If you have an article on 'smoker's life insurance', you would link to this article from a page containing all your life insurance articles - and name the link 'smoker's life insurance'. That makes the article clear to consumers, and to the SE's as well.

Watch for silo leakage. Don't link back to all pages from all your other pages. Your smoker's life insurance article can link back to the page above it, but should not link to all the other articles. You also should probably not link to pages in other silos in your site unless they are high level pages (i.e. Don't link to all your annuity articles from your life insurance pages).

One other note - you may consider linking to your home page with some text other than the word 'home' :).

SE's use your links - and your link text to tell them what each page on your site is about. This includes links from within your site!

External links
You can and should link to similar pages on other sites, even if they are your competitors. This provides consumers with other relevant information and gives the SE's more information on what your page is about. It seems counter intuitive but as they say, information wants to be free. Give your visitors information without regard to your immediate best interests, and the SE's should like that.

Here's an extreme example of this. I was helping an artisan friend get ranked for her craft. She does stained glass domes. When doing some searches on related topics, up sprang this page: www.elvesofester.com/studios.html

Now, that page doesn't really talk about stained glass domes. So why is it ranking? I believe it's ranking because it links out to a lot of sites that talk about stained glass domes. It makes sense that when trying to serve results for such a search, that a page with lots of resources to sites on that topic might be of interest to the user - and should thus rank. Similiarly, you can help the search engines treat your site as a hub by linking out to other relevant sites (including your competitors!).

Text and writing articles
First, don't scrape text from someone else's web page and drop it on yours. That's all kinds of nasty and the SE's can detect this duplicate content - and penalize you for it.

Article length should be around 250-500 words. This makes it a nice bite size for both visitors and SE's.

Keep the article focused and on topic. An article on 'life insurance for women' is going to be more useful for some visitors than a 250 word article on the general topic of 'insurance' which would be more appropriate for a book.

Do use synonyms and related words. If you're writing an article on women's life insurance, related terms such as woman, women, female, assurance, are all reasonable ways to get your point across.

As noted in the previous section, do include links within your articles to two or three other related authority sites on the subject of the article. You can find these authorities by running a search on the subject. Sites that end in .edu (educational) or .gov (government sites) are prime candidates for outbound linking.

Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific phrase appears on your page compared to the total text. i.e. If the term 'term life insurance' appears 3 times in a 100 word article, the keyword density would be 3%.

At one end of the spectrum is keyword stuffing. Just stuff the words 'term life insurance' into the page 1000 times in every place you can think of.

On the other end of the spectrum is the faint hope of of ranking in the SE's for the term 'women's life insurance' when those words don't even appear on your site.

Clearly, it's in your best interests to have text and articles on topics you're hoping to rank for. Also it should be clear that keyword stuffing is something the SE's try and avoid.

This begs the question of what keyword density is the best. 3%? 10% Nobody knows for sure but the SE's.

There are tools available that will evaluate sites that are currently ranking for specific terms. These pages are then scraped and the keyword density is calculated. From there you can perform statistical analysis (called regression analysis) to determine the optimal keyword density. One of the more prominent companies that offer these kinds of tools is www.bruceclay.com.

My attitude is that while keyword density probably works, it's currently too much effort to be bothered. There are far larger and easier fish to fry than worrying about 4% keyword density instead of 3%. Make sure text is on topic and relevant and don't keyword stuff your pages. If you've written good on topic articles the SE's will figure out on their own what the article is about and a well written article shouldn't get penalized for keyword stuffing.

Graphics
Bad news. SE's don't care if your site looks pretty. They don't read images. They don't read flash.

Yes, graphics and images can draw the eye. On a website though, that's all they do - draw the eye away from the important stuff, namely your text that is going to keep them there and convert them into leads. (graphics won't convert your visitors into leads nearly as well as text will).

And for that matter, they're not a big hit with consumers either. The fact of the matter is that consumers are coming to your site for information. You can impart a lot of information in text, not so much with a pretty picture of some old couple looking happy and rich in their retirement.

OK, so here comes my personal opinion on this (I'm admittedly biased - our websites are lean with minimal graphics). For the last 100 years insurers and agents have tried to impart a glossy feel-good stable image. Offline and when you're face to face with a consumer the touchy feely marketing stuff probably works. I'm no offline marketing expert so I can't say. I do know however that this doesn't translate to the web. Fight your urges to create a glossy brochure online! Old techniques like this don't work online and will hinder you more than they will help you. Gain your traffic by providing information rather than trying to brand an image.

Search engines and consumers won't spend all day on your site downloading pages and html code. If your site loads slow due to an overabundance of graphics, they'll pick up shop and move on. So graphics can actually hurt you. Keep your site fast loading.

In summary, the way to sell to consumers online is to provide textual information rather than lots of images.

Any images you do use on your site need to be optimized. Make sure your designer has optimized the graphics for the web. An unoptimized graphic might be 100k, whereas the same graphic optimized for the web might weigh in at under 10K - with no visible difference. If you use the unoptimized version you're wasting 90K of bandwidth and all the associated download times (and frustrated users) for absolutely no benefit.

Here's an article from webmonkey.com that discusses graphic optimization: webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/99/15/index0a.html?tw=design

A quick google on optimize graphics and similar terms will turn up plenty of tools you can use to optimize your web graphics.

Validate your code
The HTML code used to design your page should adhere to general standards. While your page may look OK in some browsers, it may completely break down in others. Just to be safe, you should run your pages through an online validator to make sure your web page code generally meets standards. The best validator out there can be found at www.w3c.org, which is also the place that the HTML standards are actually set. Doing this also reduces simple coding errors on your site that can give the SE's hiccups.

Site Map
It's a good idea to have a site map. It provides an easy to use guide for visitors, it also gives you another opportunity to provide the SE's with an additional link and associated text to each of your pages.

Google's Site Map
This isn't the same thing as an actual site map page on your site. Google recently started providing the facility for website owners to upload a site map to Google. Purportedly this will help Google index your site. The uploaded file does need to be in a specific (XML) format.

For now there doesn't seem to be an overriding reason (from an SE ranking perspective) to do this just yet. Perhaps it makes a bit of difference, but there's little to no indication of this yet. For now my opinion is that this is something else to work on when you've got nothing better to do. Or do it 'someday', whichever comes first.

UPDATE October 4, 2005: Seems that using Google sitemaps will in fact help you get indexed faster by Google. However this is more important for large database driven sites with 10's of thousands of pages. We've had no problems getting all pages indexed on sites with a few hundred pages. So if you've got a large site, look into sitemaps. If you're site is smaller, spend your time on developing inbound links and advertising rather than worrying about how to set up Google sitemaps.

Glossary/Terms/FAQ pages
Pages full of keywords like an FAQ can be useful to visitors with questions. They're also an additional opportunity to provide more content to the SE's. When setting up pages like this, make sure you again link internally to any relevant pages. If your Glossary talks about Guaranteed Issue Life insurance, and you've got an article on the subject then link to it from your glossary.

Title Tags, bolding and other style items
You should absolutely have a page title in bold at the top of every page. The page title should concisely describe what the page is about. Use bold and italics conservatively, but where appropriate. Once again it's another way to highlight important terms for both visitors and the SE's. In addition, you should have an ontopic tag at the top of every page.

Meta Tags
They're really all you need to rank!

OK, that was tongue in cheek. The reality is that you can forget meta tags for ranking. I've even seen it speculated that some of the SE's don't even use meta tags in their ranking algorithm anymore - and I believe that. At one time there was such an abuse of meta tags for ranking that they're basically useless now. Well, almost useless.

You actually should have a good suite of meta tags in your page code. A meta tag for 'keywords', one for 'author' and one for 'description.

The reason for this right now is that sometimes the SE's will use your description meta tag in their results pages. That means visitors will see that text when they do a search.

Actually, the other reason to do this is that it's good coding structure and form. And when you're doing white hat SEO good structure and form count for a lot. So put in some meta tags into your pages but don't expect them to help you rank.

Your Web Host
Your website should be with a web hosting company that is reasonably reliable and fast. As I noted above, both consumers and SE's will only spend so much time at your site waiting for pages. If your server is slow, both interested parties are going to get bored and move on.

You should be less worried about downtime than you probably are. For most of us if our site is offline for 15 minutes on a Tuesday night it's going to mean exactly nothing. We're not amazon.com here, by any stretch of the imagination. (that being said, you do want a reliable host. Recurring downtime means time to find a new host. A one time outage is nothing to worry about. Worry about speed instead.)

Website hosting is cheap these days. I've seen it at under $3 a month. As a result, webhosting companies will cram thousands of sites on one server. That puts the server under strain and will cause your site to display slower. So take the time to find a hosting company, looking at reliability in terms of uptime (without worrying about rare outages) and speed of pages.

Unfortunately these things are hard to measure. You'll see lots of talk about OC3 connections, multi-honing, and all sorts of other things. None of that makes any difference if you're on a server with 10,000 other websites. For that matter, a snappy home connection can serve web pages as fast as many hosting companies. Asking your friends and associates for recommendations is one place to start. Be aware that many sites that compare hosting companies aren't unbiased source but instead are simply well cloaked advertising venues for hosting companies.

Off page factors are things that affect your ranking, but are not on your website. There are a variety of off page factors, but there's one that you need to spend your time on - and that is LINKS.

When another website links to you, the SE's count that as a vote for you. It tells them that you have a site that is important enough for other website owners to link to. The more votes you get, the more likely you are to rank.

One of the best examples of this is to do a search on Google for the term 'miserable failure'. The top ranked page for this term is George W. Bush's bio page. Now GWB's bio clearly doesn't focus on the term 'miserable failure' so why does he rank so high?

The answer to that is inbound links. A lot of people decided to link to GWB's page using this term. Google has picked up on all of these links and determined that GWB's page must be relevant to that term - and thus he ranks. This process is known as googlebombing.

A number of conservative sites picked up on this as well and decided to bestow the same honor on Michael Moore. Mr. Moore thus also ranks well for this term (so the Republicans are getting their licks in too!).

The moral of this is that if you get enough of the right kind of links to your site you can rank. In fact, inbound linking can trump even what's on the page itself.

The right kind of link:
Only the SE's know what kind of a link they prefer. However there's plenty of emperical evidence that if the link makes sense from a consumer's viewpoint, or from your business perspective then that's a good link. If it's pushing into the area of being a relatively artificial link, then it's either a poor link or perhaps even a link that can get you penalized.

Let's look at a case on one end of the spectrum. There's a directory site located at www.site-sift.com. This site has been 'greybarred' or banned in Google. The speculation is that this is because they were advertising on www.oreilly.com. Oreilly.com is a very high profile website that sells technical books (and also accepts online advertising). The speculation is that by buying links on O'Reilly's website they were strictly attempting to manipulate the SE rankings by purchasing a link from an important site. That's probably what got them banned.

UPDATE October 4,2005: Looks like site-sift managed to beg their way back into Google's index and now has page rank again.

Now on the other end of the spectrum - all on topic one links. We ran a manual campaign for one of our SEO clients where we requested links primarily from other insurance and financial sites. All the links we developed made sense - visitors to the other sites would have an immediate interest in our client's site. In fact, we actually saw incoming traffic directly from these sites - this traffic alone was profitable. Ultimately the site climbed up to #11 (it's since slipped as we are no longer doing the SEO for that site) for the term 'term life insurance'. What's even more startling is that we weren't even targetting that term.

As we used only on topic relevant links, the site managed to make it that high for that term (and far higher for the terms we were targetting) with only hundreds or low thousands of links. Similar sites that are ranking have hundreds of thousands of links!

What's even more relevant is that we achieved this ranking without touching the website. The ranking was accomplished by develop inbound links. Links will get you rankings!

UPDATE October 4, 2005: One more emperical data point we'll mention that illustrates the concept of themed links. One of our friends has a number of sites that rank well. He was linking to another related site from about a half dozen of these sites. The recipient site was ranking for some pretty competitive keywords. When my friend removed the links, the site dropped like a stone, from the first page to the third page. Was it strictly the result of the links? No way to no for sure but it sure seems like it was likely. I think it's another good illustration of why you need one way links from sites in your industry.

What needs to be understood from this is that the SE's are well aware of who is linking to you. They can tell what is an insurance related site and what isn't. Some links are more powerful than others. And ultimately, some links are very powerful and others are just plain bad for your site.

Stick to relevant on topic links and you should be fine. Plus you'll have the advantage of actually receiving traffic (and converting that to sales) from your inbound links!

Reciprocal Links
When developing your inbound links one thing that springs immediately to mind is the idea of reciprocal links. If links work so well, wouldn't it be easy to call other insurance website owners and swap links with them?

Actually, this is a tried and true method of developing links. In fact you can automate this process. Programs exist that will crawl the web for pages that offer to link to you, submit your link and then automatically place a reciprocal link on your page.

This process has been abused in the past though so now SE's severely devalue direct reciprocal links. You might need 100 reciprocal links to count for the weight of just one one-way on topic link. So if you're going to develop reciprocal links you'll need to have a huge volume of them to have any impact on your rankings. Nevertheless some people are using this technique to rank successfully. In fact, many sites have entire directories containing tens of thousands of reciprocal links.

The single largest danger of a reciprocal linking campaign is linking out to a 'bad neighbourhood'. The SE's see the sites that you link out to as being relevant to your site. Why would you link out to a casino site? Or a flower shop? In fact, if you're linking out to a site that Google considers to be a bad neighbourhood, they might consider you to be a bad neighbourhood and penalize or even ban your site. So be very careful about who you decide to swap links with.

Triangular links
To beat the reciprocal link dampening instituted by the SE's some people have taken to creating triangular links. Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C and Site C links back to Site A.

This is clearly an artificial structure and certainly if used in excess is something the SE's would rather not see utilized. However careful use of this technique can yield results.

Unlike reciprocal links that are easy to test for I don't believe SE's can easily check for triangular links on a wholesale basis in their algorithms. They can however easily hand check a site and penalize or ban it for excessive use of this technique or any other. I believe triangular linking is one method that is likely difficult to test for automatically but probably sticks out like a sore thumb when checked manually.

One Way Inbounds
These are by far the most heavily weighted links in the SE's eyes. There are two reasons for this. First as I noted above SE's see a link as a vote. If a large number of insurance and financial sites deem your site worthy to receive a link the SE's are assuming your site is relevant to consumers as well. Secondly one way inbounds are hard to fake - to create artificially - so the don't lend themselves as easily to manipulation. For those looking to take the fast route to link development, quality, on topic, one way inbound links are too time consuming to bother with in most cases. These types of links are thus signs of a quality site that's been properly marketed.

There are many ways to develop one way inbound links. Below we're going to list and review a variety of ways to start getting these links.

WebRings
Webrings are one of the oldest and time tested ways to get traffic. Simply have a group of similar sites point at other members. If you've ever seen a web ring on a site you'll know that it's common to click through to see what the next site in the ring is - since it's clearly on a topic you're already interested in.

The biggest and most effective insurance and financial webring that we know of is at www.insurancewebring.com. Head over and sign up now! The site is a fast and effective way to get links that will provide traffic from other insurance and financial sites. For many sites and certainly for sites just getting started just joining this site alone will be enough to make a serious dent in your link building campaign. In fact we know of no better way to get so many one way links from other insurance and financial related sites as fast and as easy as this.

Note: as of October 4, 2005 insurancewebring is under construction, it's expected to be live within 2 weeks. Watch for it!

Content
This has to be the most boring way to create links. Yet it's something you need to be doing.

Content basically means putting up articles on your site. Target your articles to specific topics - and write a lot of them. Hundreds of articles is not too many. If you can't write the articles yourself there are tons of professional writers skilled in writing web content these days, at unbelievably cheap prices. In fact an entire industry has sprung up around this need. Housewives looking for some extra cash, college students, and many others are finding this a fast easy way to get income.

Content helps you in a number of ways. First if the content is good you'll find that other sites may link to your page. (Clearly this is an example of why the SE's use links. The other site is linking to your page because you've positioned yourself as an authority). In fact if you have the right articles, you can even suggest to other sites that they may want to link to your content. If the articles are relevant to their visitors you can find other site owners are sometimes willing to give you a free link because it's of use to their visitors. And finally, content is just plain old fodder for the search engines. When they're looking for results for a specific term, finding an article on that topic helps them provide better results to their users.

One final note on content; you might also consider creating unique content then offering it to other sites. Allowing them to publish your free content - conditional on a link to your site within the article - is a great way to get one way links.

Searching for people offering to link to you
There are actually any number of sites that will willingly link to you. It's simply a matter of finding those sites. And how would you go about finding a site that meets your needs? Search engines of course!

The trick here is to figure out the text that people might put on their pages offering you a link. Once you've got that figured out it's as easy as running a search for that term. Such a search should yield you literally hundreds of potential pages.

Here's some example searches:

• "submit your site" + insurance
• "submit your link" + insurance
• "submit url" + insurance

And the list goes on. You should be able to develop tens or hundreds of similar searches that will provide you lists of sites willing to link to you.

Currently ranked sites
This technique involves finding similar sites that are already ranking and requesting a link. If you're going to approach sites like this you should probably do so by telephone. You'll have more success doing this. More importantly you'll need something on your site to offer them as a reason to link to you. For example, a smoking advocacy site might find it beneficial for their visitors to link to your article on how smokers can get inexpensive life insurance.

Once again, we hit the SE's to find these potential sites. This time we're looking to do searches on related industries that might have a reason to link to your page.

Suggested searches:

• "personal financial planning"
• " life insurance for women"
• " personal finances"

Pages 3,4,5 and higher of these searches can be a real goldmine of sites that might be interested in linking to you. And frequently these are the best places to find sites that will also send you traffic. Would a smoker visiting a smoker advocacy site be interested in getting smoker-specific insurance rates? Absolutely.

You'll need a hook though, to offer these other sites as a reason to link to you. In the life insurance industry the best way to do that is still our online term life insurance shopping system (seeour whitepaper on online insurance marketing). Suggesting to other sites that you have the largest online database of life insurance companies on the web is an excellent way to get links. Yes there are other term quoting shopping systems, but if you're comparing yourself to the big brand name insurance shopping sites you'll find that our plug in shopping system quotes more companies. Other sites find this interesting - and a beneficial thing to offer their visitors. And at the price (only $179/year if you're already a Compulife ® subscriber) your payback is as fast as the first link you develop as a result of having this system on your website.

Related Industries
Do searches for sites that are in closely related industries. That will provide you with further lists of sites that might be prone to giving you a link.

Here's an example. I used to run a website for actuaries that took millions of visits every year. As a result I was reasonably well known in the actuarial community. Clearly, actuarial sites are closely related to the insurance industry. I ran some searches for the personal websites of actuaries and contacted them directly requesting links. I obtained some very nice on topic links this way - many offered a free link once I told them who I was (webmaster at one of their favorite sites). Offering them a few dollars only sweetened the deal. At the time of my writing this, to my knowledge I was the only person who'd tapped into this market - so be creative. There are plenty of untapped areas to find links. Are there any underwriters out there with blogs?

Press Releases
Press releases are a great way to develop links. You actually end up getting links in a number of ways when you use press releases. First the press release company (and you're going to need to use a professional press release company) will archive your release on their page. And if the release has a link to your site - and of course it will - the press company just gave you a link. Press releases are then picked up by online media outlets who then republish your release on their site.

The final step in the domino effect is that visitors to the media outlet might find your site of interest and link to you from their site.

A press release site that I've used in the past is www.prweb.com. They've got press release services that include optimizing your site for the search engines and seem pretty knowledgeable on the subject.

Directories
Getting listed in directories can be a good way to get one way links and should be one of the cornerstones of your link building campaigns. It's an easy and relatively inexpensive way to get a lot of links fast.

You will need to be careful though. Many directories don't pass any benefit to your site. You can waste a lot of time submitting to directories that won't do you any good from either a search engine or traffic perspective. Look for things like:

• Page rank(*) of the specific page your site will be listed on.
• Other sites already listed on that page - do you want to be in this neighbourhood?
• Do they pass pagerank? Specifically check the code of the page for any funky javascript, redirects, or use of the 'nofollow' tag.
• Age of the directory. The older, the better.

(*) Page rank is a number calculated by Google. It's a number between 0 and 10 that acts as a measure of the importance of your site on the web. Actually, more specifically, it describes the chances of visiting your site on a random walk around the web. You should keep an eye on page rank but don't get too caught up on it. To keep an eye on page rank, use Firefox as your browser instead of Internet Explorer, then install a google toolbar in Firefox. Googling these terms should tell you how to do all that. Don't get caught up in page rank as some measure of ranking, because effectively it's not. A further note, if you install a google toolbar, you'll see the page rank as a green bar. A page rank of 0 will show you a completely white bar. That's actually OK, Google sees this page it's just not a hugely important page. However if the bar is grey instead of white be very careful. That means the page doesn't have page rank at all, not even 0. And that means for some reason Google doesn't acknowledge the page. Add to that the fact that Google only updates the page rank displayed sporadically (a few times a year) and you can see that you need to treat page rank with a leary eye.

Don't be afraid to pay for good directory listings. Some of these listings are absolutely worth hundreds of dollars a year. If they drive 10 visitors to your site this year and you close 20% of your traffic, you just made two sales. Seems like a profitable proposition to me!

Some industry specific directories:

• www.term4sale.com. This directory actually isn't indexed by the search engines. However the front pages of the site rank well in the SE's and bring in a lot of traffic. Consumers drill down and find your name in the directory - then call you to buy insurance. (Heck, with a deal as sweet as that maybe I should be selling insurance! Or maybe not.). I receive overwhelmingly positive feedback about listings on this site. You do need to subscribe to Compulife's services at www.compulife.com to get a listing. You can buy up additional zip code listings in the directory as well (show up wherever you do business) and I recommend to all my clients that they buy as many zip codes as they can. It's a cheap source of traffic.


• www.ultimateinsurancelinks.com. I spoke with the owner of this site a while back and he's a very pleasant and helpful fellow. Unfortunately he recently revised the site and in my opinion screwed up the SE's access to the listings. If that's all there was to it, I would not recommend a listing. However his list is copied and republished by a variety of other sites - and those sites provide good results. So your primary benefit is from the secondary listings in this case. Get listed in this directory and count on links and traffic from all the directory sites that copy or mirror this site's data.


• www.webuildpages.com/directory - Jim from upstate New York has compiled a list of the top directories to submit to. They're not industry specific and they all cost money. Nevertheless, submit to them all. Jim is a frequent speaker at SEO industry conferences. I've spoken with him numerous times and he knows what he's talking about.

Notice that two of the above directories aren't even indexed by the SE's. So they won't directly see your listing on those sites. Nevertheless they're all places I immediately start with when creating a link campaign. Watch directories with a critical eye - the obvious is not always what it seems. The opposite is true as well - sometimes directories that initially look great won't provide you with any benefit.

Other ways to find directories
Once again we use the SE's to help us. We're looking for text on pages that would indicate the site is an insurance or related directory. Here's some examples:

• insurance directory
• insurance directories
• list of insurance brokers

Another way to find directories is to look for 'footprints'. These are identifying marks created as the result of the directory using specific software. First, you'll need to determine what software people are using. Do some searches for directory software, find sites that use that software and see if they contain similar text. Also have a look at the directories you've found so far for footprints.

For example, lets say there's a directory program a lot of people use called 'Hamster's Directory Software'. This software places a copyright notice on the bottom of all the pages of any directory using that software. Want to find directory sites using this software? Do a search on things like:

Copyright 2004 Hamster's Directory Software.
Hamsters Directory software version 3.05
(or whatever you see on the bottom of pages using their software).

If the directory program requires a link back to the software company's page, you can check the sites that link to their site for directories. To find a list of links you'll need to use Yahoo! (not Google) and do this search:

linkdomain:www.directorysoftware.com
replacing www.directorysoftware.com with the URL of the directory software company. That will produce a list of sites that link to the software company - and that should be a list of directories you can submit to.

Buying Links
If a link is going to generate traffic, you should seriously consider paying for it. We've paid as much as $500 per year for a link. As the site is generating buying traffic, it's still a profitable arrangement. You'll need to carefully evaluate paid links though. Your primary goal with a paid link that costs a noticeable amount should be the direct traffic it provides rather than an SE benefit (for smaller directory sites, spending $20-$100 is less of a consideration and should be more a part of your overall strategy. At that price point it's a fast way to build good links.).

Another option is to use the services of a link broker. There are a variety of companies that will let you purchase links from their network of sites. One of the more well known companies is www.text-link-ads.com. You need to be very careful with this type of purchase however. If Google perceives your site as buying links strictly for link popularity you can be banned. In addition, I would be concerned that you can't evaluate the specific sites that your link will be placed on. And as I noted above, the quality of sites linking to you is of utmost importance. It's possible that you'll even receive links from sites completely unrelated to the insurance industry. I can't comment specifically on text-link-ads or any other link broker specifically as I've never used any of their services for the above reasons. If you are going to use services of a link broker you should at least make sure you have control over the specific sites you are paying to get links from.

The next step is to combine the above techniques. Do searches on related industries. Find sites that rank that might give you a link. If they won't, offer to pay them a few bucks for a link. If you do your homework you'll be surprised at where you can get links.

Who is currently linking to your competitors?
Here's a thought. If a website is linking to your competitor - might they also link to you? Absolutely - again there are thousands of places you can start finding sites to link to you just by looking at who is already linking.

Currently you need to use Yahoo! To check for backlinks (not Google, which provides limited results). If you want to see who is linking to a website, do the following search:

linkdomain:www.website.com

Of course this is a good way to monitor sites that link to you as well. But more importantly you can monitor your competition. Do a search on a relevant term like 'term life insurance in florida'. Have a look at the top 50 sites. For each one of them, do the above search at yahoo. That will give you thousands of sites that currently link to other insurance sites.

At that point you'll have to start surfing over to those sites to determine why they're providing that link to your competition, and if they might provide you a link. Yes, that's a lot of work but it can be very fruitful.

Similar Sites
Google has a feature called similar sites. For a lot of reasons this is starting to garner some attention. For link development, again it gives us another list of sites that Google sees as being related that we might get links from (or other linking ideas).

To access the similar sites list, do a search on Google for something like 'term life insurance' Below each site is a link that says 'similar sites'. These are sites that Google thinks are related to sites that are top ranking for that phrase - and can be a good place to get links. In this case I'm suggesting the links are good, not that they're easy to get.

This section of Google can also reveal some interesting things about sites. You might wonder why Google would see a cell phone ringtone site as similar to an insurance site. Well, the answer to that is that the insurance site has been using poor link practices - just like the cell phone ring tone site.

There's plenty of indication that Google is working towards cleaning this up. If your site seems to be a cell phone ring tone site or a casino site, why are you ranking for life insurance terms? Clearly somethings wrong with that - expect it to be fixed at some point in the future. The lesson here is when your site comes up, you want the similar sites to be all insurance and financial related.

More to come later on this topic, but bear in mind that this similar site search and neighbourhood concept is looking to be the next thing in search engine linking strategy.

Other Resources
Here's a brief list of sites that you can use to research and get additional ideas from or sites that are useful. Some of them I've mentioned above:

• www.term4sale.com - directory site, good place to get a listing.


• www.insurancewebring.com - you should sign up for this one right away. I know of no better way to get dozens of insurance text link ads at once.


• www.webmasterworld.com - just what it sounds like. Lots of search engine information there, a very busy forum


• www.stuntdubl.com - a blog from a master SEO'er. Frequent speaker on link development and related issues at SEO conventions and a nice guy. He works with Jim over at www.webuildpages.com, another place to check out.


• www.threadwatch.org - a bit more edgy than webmasterworld.com but a nice place to stay in touch with what's going on in the industry.


• www.seobook.com - Aaron Wall's site. His SEO Book is a good read for those at entry to mid level. Lots of good resources listed in his book as well.

This document is Copyright © 2005 and may not be duplicated or distributed without permission.
Glenn Cooke
Insurance Squared Inc.
www.insurancesquared.com
1-866-662-5433