Microdata, an Important Update to Your Website, That No One Will Ever See

In previous posts I have mentioned that search engines are becoming smarter. They are no longer looking for backlinks to determine your website’s content relevancy. They are looking at the content itself. They are looking for data.
Your website is littered with data: phone numbers, product offerings, address information, company facts and figures, employee details and much more. More often than not, the data is placed in the web page HTML, formatted to look good for a visitor and forgotten. 

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Don’t Chase Google’s Algorithm

In September 2012, Google stopped up-ranking Exact Match Domains (EMDs). EMDs are domain names that include keyword phrases such as commercial insurance in the domain name getcommercialinsuranceintexas.com. People would snatch these up by the hundreds in the hope of capturing the traffic. This worked for a while, but then Google caught on. Overnight, they downplayed the importance in their algorithm of EMDs. Webmasters that relied heavily on this tactic instantly lost rankings. In fact, it affected 0.6% of all U.S English search queries to a “noticeable degree.”

In the previous years, I had recommended that you not use EMDs and instead focus all of your SEO time and energy on a single domain. You could (and sometimes should) use an EMD if you are pointing a specific marketing campaign from television, radio or print to a landing page geared for capturing and keeping that exact traffic.

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Earning Backlinks vs. Building Them

The goal of any SEO strategy is to get your website noticed. One of the more important aspects of most SEO strategies is developing backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that link back to your site. These links tell the search engines, “Hey, this site has some good info, and I link to it!” Most search engines use this to determine how popular a website is on the Internet. Let us first look at why search engines use this as a primary metric in determining where your website shows within the organic search results.

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6 Local Business Directories You Can't Ignore

1. Google Local: This is the big dog of all local business directories. If you aren't listed here, you're throwing away money and missing out on potential customers. Filling out your listing completely and having your customers review your business should result in high rankings. Top local listings appear on the first page of the search results.

2. Yahoo Local: This is another large local business directory. Listings can take up to a month to be approved since they are manually reviewed.

3. Bing Local: This business directory shares the same format at Google and Yahoo local listings. Once you submit your listing, Bing will mail a postcard to your business with a verification code.

4. Hotfrog.com: This directory has over 71 million businesses globally. They claim that businesses will rank higher because their technology helps get your unique keywords picked up by search engines.

5. Yelp.com: Yelp is very popular local directory the ranks well with search engines. So, your actual Yelp listing may show up in the search results. The more positive reviews a business has, the better the higher the business ranking. This isn't dofollow, but it is free and should send at least a few customers your way.

6. Kudzu.com: Kudzu is a highly-rated nationwide directory that allows free listings. It takes a few days to be approved, but the listing allows images and categories important to be ranked in the search engines.


Is your business listed with all of the important local business directories? Our SEO team at Insurance Website Builder can always make recommendations to make your insurance agent website more visible on the internet. Call us today at 1-800-383-3482 for more information.

Bing overtakes Yahoo! as the #2 Search Engine

New figures just released last month, show that Bing (Microsoft sites) has overtaken Yahoo as the second most popular search engine on the Web, according to comScore. Microsoft sites increased their search share by 0.1% compared to the previous month, and interestingly Yahoo decreased theirs by 0.5%. This is in-keeping with the recent move by Yahoo to merge their Site Explorer with Bing's Webmaster Tools, as Yahoo focuses more on paid advertising and Bing focuses on search.