Mortgage Seo - Search Engine Optimization For Mortgage Brokers

Mortgage SEO, or search engine optimization, is the act of improving your mortgage marketing website for better search engine visibility and ranking. This leads directly to increases in website traffic, which (if you have a lead generation strategy in place) translates to an increase in web-based mortgage leads.



All good things, yes?



So here are quick tips for mortgage SEO that will help you improve your mortgage website's search engine ranking:



1.



Add 10 pages of content to your website.

Do some key phrase research and come up with 10 phrases relevant to your products and services. Write a page of content (or pay somebody to) on each of those phrases. Incorporate this new content within your site. You've just increases your potential search engine visibility for those phrases. Not too hard, was it?



Increasing a website's size by adding quality content is one of the easiest, most low-cost strategies for mortgage SEO.



The volume of content on your mortgage website is the one thing you have total control over, so why not take advantage of that for mortgage SEO purposes?



2. Submit a press release online.

When you publish a press release online through a service like PRWeb.com, you have the opportunity to include hyperlinks within your release that link back to your mortgage website. This helps increase your "link popularity," which has a direct influence on your search engine visibility.



You'll also get plenty of exposure through the press release itself. Double benefits!



3. Start a mortgage blog.

If you're serious about mortgage marketing online, you really should launch a mortgage blog. The benefits of blogging are many. It helps you grow your website, acquire inbound links, build your reputation, inform your readers, reinforce your brand … the list goes on. Best of all, blogs are easy to use, even for web novices. If you can type an email, you can publish a mortgage blog.



Conclusion

Do all of the things on this list require an effort on your part? Absolutely. But when it comes to mortgage SEO and search engine ranking, effort is what separates the front-runners from the "also ran" contenders.



* You may republish this article online if you retain the author's byline active hyperlinks below.

Mortgage Seo Is Not Mortgage Lead Generation

Advanced Summary: In this article, I'll explain an important distinction that is often "blurred" in the minds of many mortgage professionals who use the Internet for mortgage marketing purposes. As the title suggests, that distinction is between mortgage SEO (search engine optimization) and mortgage lead generation.



About once a week, I receive a phone call from a potential client asking about my search engine optimization (SEO) services.



At some point, the caller will say something like, "I need search engine optimization because my website does not generate leads."



This is usually when I pause for a brief "lecture" on the difference between SEO and lead generation. The purpose of mortgage SEO is to generate web traffic. That's it. If you were under the impression that mortgage SEO generated leads as well, then I'm sorry to disappoint you



Of course, this doesn't mean that a good mortgage SEO program cannot help you generate leads.



It can surely help you with the lead-generation cause, but only by providing you with traffic from which to generate those leads. In order to realize the full lead-producing potential of your mortgage website, you have to combine SEO with an effective lead-generation program.



If you increase the amount of traffic to a mortgage website with no lead-generation techniques in use, you will more traffic but still no leads. On the other hand, if you increase the amount of traffic to a mortgage website with effective lead generation, the increased traffic will directly correspond to increased leads and inquiries.



Or to state it mathematically:



* False: Web traffic = web leads



* True: Web traffic + lead generation = web leads



Web Traffic is Only an Opportunity



To further clarify the distinction between mortgage SEO, website traffic and lead generation, I often use the analogy of a lemonade stand.



For the sake of this analogy, let's pretend you have set up a lemonade stand beside a busy highway. The problem is, your lemonade stand is situated on a narrow shoulder of the road where cars cannot pull over.



You can imagine the result. Cars whiz by you all day long, but none of them stop. So here you have an endless supply of traffic that you are not capitalizing on. As a result, your lemonade stand is a failure. The traffic is right in front of you, but it might as well be a million miles away.



Now convert that lemonade stand to your mortgage website, and convert the vehicle traffic into web traffic, and you will see my point. Opportunity only favors those who capitalize on it. If your mortgage website has plenty of traffic but does poorly in the lead-generation department, then most of your web traffic will pass right by .



.. like those cars passing the lemonade stand.



Mortgage SEO is a traffic generator. Mortgage lead generation is a lead generator. Though they work together, they are two separate things.



* You may republish this article online if you keep the author's note and the active hyperlinks below. Copyright 2007, Brandon Cornett.

Inexpensive Internet Advertising For The Real Estate Industry

Most real estate agents and mortgage brokers have heard the stories of how some of their contemporaries are making a fortune from generate leads and eventually sales produced by internet traffic. Maybe at one point or another you (agent or broker) have wanted to get involved in the internet marketing arena, but had no idea where to start. Possibly you went as far as having your friends niece design you a website…now what?



Many people are so confused about marketing their site and the fear of being ripped off that they never really do much with their site.



This is equivalent to having thousands of brochures or promotional materials created and spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on the design and creation, and then never sending them out. In its simplest form a website is just another promotional material just in a non-traditional format from print.



Your website is an interactive ad you have created, internet marketing is the distribution of advertisement (your website). Is there a point to spend time and money on an ad that hardly anyone will see?



I'm sure this is not the first time you have heard this or come to this realization.



So, now the question becomes what are some viable options to promote my website and my service? There are many ways to promote a website, but most are expensive. Whether this is an expense of your time through doing research and implementation of your learned techniques, or paying a search engine marketing professional to do this for you, it will cost you. This can be a profitable endeavor, but it can be costly and may take up to 6 months to receive any relevant performance depending on a variety of factors that we won't go into today.



So what should real estate agents do to begin gaining internet traffic that can expand their client base and increase their sales?



There are several options that will work if an agent or mortgage broker is willing to spend a fair budget on marketing themselves online, or willing to wait for their organic search engine rankings to take hold. Even if you are incorporating traditional internet marketing techniques there are several inexpensive methods to further expand your ability to market yourself online to potential clients.



Here are 3 quick and easy options that will jump-start your real estate related marketing within a month! Even if you currently have a good website and are utilizing search engine optimization techniques, these methods can still be valuable tools to improve your visibility and enhance your internet marketing.



1. Craigslist.com - If you're a real estate agent and you haven't discovered Craigslist, you are way behind the curve. Craigslist is a quick, easy and effective way to advertise your listings, your website, and business.



Agents can post on a very regular basis for free, which includes free hosting for the property photos, inclusion of links to your website.



Another valuable aspect about using Craigslist is that your listing will more than likely get picked up by the search engines, and many other sites use postings in Craigslist to populate data for their sites such as HousingMaps.com. In less than 10 minutes you can get hundreds to thousands of prospective clients to view your listing, see all of your contact information, have you ad go out on many other websites and get another page indexed in the search engines, and it doesn't cost you a dime!



2.



MyLocalProfile.com - MyLocalProfile is a fairly new product that leverages the power of several prominent data providers that the major search engines use to backfill the their local listing information on their regular search results, and on their local search listings. MylocalProfile gives any company or business that has a physical location to create and control the information that is listed in the search engines pertaining to their business. This powerful tool gives companies the ability to update and change items such as their address, phone number, website address, company products, and many other listed items from one central profile.



Another great feature about MyLocalProfile is that it creates a basic website that provides all their pertinent information. This is a valuable asset to local businesses that are not really in need of a fully functioning website such as a neighborhood coffeehouse to a local hardware store.



3. Real Estate Directories - Many real estate professionals may be unaware of this, but there are thousands of directories that will list your site absolutely free. This is beneficial for several reasons, most notably free traffic to your website, and increased links to your site (this is one element that can improve your search engine rankings).



Taking this a step further there are a decent amount of directories that are specialized towards the real estate industry only. Most of real estate directories are free or less than 20 bucks to have your site listed. Just go to the search engine of your choice and search for "real estate directories" and you will get a clearer picture of this opportunity.



Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will your internet traffic. The opportunities I've laid out are quick, effective, and moreover inexpensive methods of driving traffic to your site.



Spend even 1 hour a week implementing these quick results strategies and you'll see viable results without committing thousands of dollars towards a seo campaign, or tens of hours trying to learn and optimize your site on your own. Even if you are implementing a search engine optimization campaign utilizing the above-mentioned techniques will still benefit your hunt to gain traffic quickly as your seo campaign develops.