It’s been a few days since I set up the WordPress site on the sample domain. I have done nothing with the site since then. It only has the first post I created on it. I will be adding to it down the road but for now I just want to show you where it ranks 5 days after the first post. It would be ranking higher if I had a better domain name but I decided to work with a domain I already owned since AZ and Arizona can be sometimes interchanged with the search engines (exact matching ‘Arizona’ and ‘Arizona’ will be better than how I have it now and is encouraged) and I’m confident of what to do here.

This screen shot below is from Market Samurai’s rank tracker section. I use it to track where my site, and all its pages, rank against the keywords I’m targeting (on the left cut off).

The Broad Position ranking is if you just type in the keyword by itself. The Phrase Position is if you were to type the keyword phrase inside quotes in the search engine. Ex. Broad – home insurance, Phrase – “home insurance.”

The G, Y & B are Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. On the right it shows BL and PR. BL is the amount of links back to that page on your site from other websites (backlinks) and the PR is the Page Rank of the page listed. Page Rank is a level of authority Google gives sites. A PR of 10 is much better than a PR of 1 (or 0 like here) and if you get links from PR 10 sites to your site that means more to your rankings than a link to your site from a PR 1 site. I’ll explain more on this later.

As you can see, the homepage is at 162 (page 17) and 169 for two different keywords. I’m also in the 3rd (1st page!) and 24th (3rd page) on Yahoo for those same keywords. With Bing I’ve been indexed but not ranked. That’s indicated by the ‘+’ sign. The ‘-‘ sign means I don’t rank for that keyword (yet).

This is the power of a blog based site backed with, the more important, market research.

SEO Competition Analysis

Here’s a shot of the SEO Competition page from Market Samurai and I’ll walk through how you use it as your guide to getting your page ranked fast. I briefly talked about this in the market research videos and will show you how to use this page as your roadmap on how to work your site and make it search engine optimized.

The first 2 rows of this image are the two URLs from my home site listed above. The first is the homepage and the second is the post I created the other day. The next 10 are the 10 sites listed on the first page of Google for this keyword (I’m not on the first page for this yet).

First, some SEO basics. Your site is ranked by two major factors: On Page and Off Page factors. Off Page factors have more influence to your ranking than On Page but you have more control over On Page factors. These are very simple descriptions but important to understand so you can take action.

The Off Page Factors (listed in the columns above) are:

• DA – Domain age. Older domains are considered established businesses and will get better ranking if all else is the same.
• PR – Google Page Rank. This is Google’s authority index of a web page. Higher PR is better for you and will rank higher.
• BLP – Backlinks to the Page. Number of backlinks to the specific page ranked. ex: www.site.com/page.html
• BLD – Backlinks to the Domain. Total number of backlinks to the domain. Any page on www.site.com.
• BLEG – Backlinks to the Page from .edu or .gov websites. This supposedly have more authority and are harder to get.
• DMZ – dmoz directory listing. This is the largest manually updated online directory of sites. You can submit your site to get listed to their directory to help your rankings.
• YAH – Yahoo paid directory listing. Yahoo just stopped charging their $300 fee to be listed in their directory so I don’t know how this will play out in the future. It is still considered a ranking factor as of now, however but I expect will change soon.

The On Page Factors (listed in the columns above) are:

• Title – Page Title. Is the keyword in the page title? This is the title that shows up in the top of your browser. It is also shown as the title on a search.
• URL – URL. Is the keyword in the page URL?
• DESC – Page Description. Is the keyword in the page description? The description is what’s listed under the link on a search results page.
• Head – Header Tags. Is the keyword used in an html header tag on the page? These are generally the larger fonts on the page but a <h1> tag is generally the headline on the page and an indicator of what the page is about.
• CA – Cache Age. Number of days since Google reindexed the page. If Google gets sent to your page a lot from other site’s links to yours, this is a good thing. You want your site crawled a lot, if possible.

Okay, so that’s the definitions of what’s there. So what next?

You have control of the Title, URL, DESC and Head on each page of your site. Make those contain the keywords your targeting to get that page ranking for those keywords. Now, if you didn’t already, you see why it’s important to have the major keyword in your domain. This will allow the homepage to rank more easily for that keyword and give you the 4 – ‘Y’ across those fields, as I have with my first post.

If you’re using Headway Theme, it puts all these fields on each post page for you to update and make sure it’s SEO friendly. If you’re using the SEO plugin it will create these fields to work with for this.

Then, your next steps are to create content for your site. Create an About, Contact & Privacy page for your site. The search engines like these. You also want to create content on a regular basis to get the engines to crawl your site on a regular basis. In your WordPress blog, use the supporting keywords as categories and write a post for each category over the next couple of weeks.

Last, you want to create links back to your site to increase your off page factors. This is easier than you think and I’ll go into it in much more detail later. However, you’ll be creating simple pages on other (free) sites that will link back to your site. These are very easy to do. If you have good information on your blog, other bloggers will link back to your site too. (If you want to learn more on Blogging and getting your blog out there Yaro Starak has a great program I went through last year and highly recommend called Blog Mastermind. It’s more for people that want to make money blogging but it can apply here too. I’ll be going through some of his information here if you don’t decide to get it.)

I’m guessing I’ll need only a couple dozen links back to my site to rank on the first page for this keyword. This is an easy target to shoot for and is the start of my process now that I have the On Page factors completed here.

If you have more questions on Market Samurai and want more explanation using the software they have some excellent videos walking you through almost every aspect of the program. Their team is incredible at showing you how to use this tool. I wish all my kids toys came with instruction manuals as detailed as their videos.

With that, let me know what you think below and any questions you have. Also, share with other agents you know that could benefit from this. There’s a I’ll be going over link building, blogging, social networking, more Market Samurai soon.

WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com

The main difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com is where your site is hosted.

WordPress.com is hosted at WordPress.com. Your URL would be yourname.wordpress.com. While it’s easy to set up and get started this way, you will have only a few choices for themes and no flexibility with plugins. It’s hosted on their site so they won’t let you make changes and risk messing up their site.

WordPress.org is hosted on your domain. Your URL would be whateverdomainnameyoubuy.com. It’s actually a version of the software running WordPress.com that you put on your webhost. It’s free. It’s fully customizable with any of the thousands of themes available or any of the plugins you want to use to expand what it can do.

Now, since you’re probably not familiar with either, the WordPress.org sounds nice but maybe a little scary. You can set up an account at WordPress.com just to get a feel for the guts of the system and how it works. However, if you want to add quote forms or additional features that make your site actually your site then you’ll need to host it on your domain, on your webhosting platform. This is why I recommend Hostgator because you can set up the WordPress.org with a few clicks.

I hope that clears up the confusion and helps you understand why I recommend the self hosted WordPress installation.

Should you use your current website?

Since I know nothing of your current site, I don’t know. However, if you’re like 99% of insurance agents your site will not be worthwhile for this project. If your site already has ranking on the first few pages for the keywords you found in Step 1 – Market Research, keep your site. If not, start with a fresh site and, when you follow these steps, you should be ranking very high, very quickly.

Can I Have A Traditional Site Built For This Niche?

Of course. You can use a traditional “static” site for this purpose. However, wait before commissioning it to be built. In the next videos I’ll show how to take the “on page” ranking data from Market Samurai and how that determines what you put on your website and where you put it.

Keep in mind, if you’re unfamiliar with html and how to change anything your site then you won’t have any flexibility to make changes either. For example, one of my sites was ranking in the mid 30’s on Google (it was 3 pages into search results). I made one change on the page with a few words of text and in about 2 days, after Google crawled it again, it was in the top 10. It took about 3 seconds for me to make that change because I use a WordPress blog where updating the page is very simple.

Can I Use WordPress Like A Traditional Website?

Yes! Very much so.

If you want, you can create a static homepage. How I recommend doing it is creating a page titled, “Home.” Then in the “reading settings,” there’s an option to choose “A static page” for your homepage. Here’s a screenshot of the settings, and you just choose which page you want for your homepage.

Another option, which I personally use, is to use one of the premium themes by StudioPress or Headway.

Headway will allow you to actually customize how the homepage will appear inside its settings with very easy drag and drop settings.

The StudioPress Themes have various layouts with excerpts from your recent blog posts for the homepage. It’s a little more difficult to customize these themes unless you have knowledge of CSS, PHP and HTML. However, the layouts they offer are very clean and easy to use.

Will You Be Writing A Lot?

This is the fear of many agents. Yes, this will involve writing. It’s not difficult to come up with ideas to write about. Also, don’t fear bad grammar, splitting infinitives, or other writing “boo boos.”

As you can tell by reading what I write here, I don’t care if my English teacher writes on her screen with a red pen about my grammatical errors. My site is now graded on dollars earned, not by some random person with an attitude. So, unless your niche is school teachers, don’t worry about it.

Second, you have no shortage of what to write about. Anytime you get a question from a customer or a tip from an insurance company, that’s a topic to write about. Don’t worry about giving away the farm to your competition. (Look what I’m giving away here.) Your writing will build you up as an authority in your area. Your competition won’t be reading your site everyday so forget that fear.

While you don’t have to write a lot, the more content you produce the more keywords you’ll rank for in Google. If you can make a commitment to write two or three 300-800 word articles (500 word average) a week, that relate to your keyword, you’ll increase your ranking much more quickly.

Don’t stress over this but it’s a great habit to get into. If you do it for 30-60 minutes everyday when you wake up, you’ll grease your brain and find this to be an easier process everyday. Most of my articles take about 15 minutes to write, 5-10 minutes to edit and 5-10 minutes to find the images to place with them and post to the site. (In case you haven’t noticed I’m not the best at editing) Set aside time and make it a habit (read the War of Art to understand the importance of discipline and how it increases your creativity).

If you feel you don’t have time for writing, wake up earlier. You can make the time, if you want it bad enough. You can also have staff write articles for you. And, over the next few weeks I’ll show you how to find other people’s content and rewrite it for your site. Whatever you do, do NOT steal other people’s content. Make it your own.

What Next?

Okay, I should have went over this at the beginning in more detail but I was so excited about getting the content out it slipped my mind.

Ultimately, this is about establishing your market authority online. You’ll become the recognized expert quickly. You’ll learn how to network online, tap into other professional’s readers and get referrals. This is about becoming the market leader online.

We’ll dissect the results from Market Samurai to figure out what’s important to ranking for keywords that are actually searched by consumers. Then, you’ll learn how to create content that establishes you as an authority and increase the ranking of your site. Last, you’ll learn how to meet and find other professionals online that will network with you and give you referrals and increase traffic to your site and your authority in the marketplace.

Quick note, I’ve had a few people ask about using Traffic Travis instead of Market Samurai. Traffic Travis is a great piece of software that I use too. It has a new simple to understand SEO tool but does not compare in other features to Market Samurai. If you have Traffic Travis you can use it for research but will be missing out on the many other features Market Samurai offers as we go through this. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then just ignore this paragraph and get Market Samurai)

Hope that clarifies a lot of where we’re going here and the method to what you’re learning.

It’s taking me a little longer than anticipated to get the videos out on time as I want to put them on YouTube and have to edit each segment to 10 minute or less intervals. Good thing is it breaks everything up into shorter, more easily watchable segments.

With that, comment below and let me know what you think about the process or if you have any questions.