Not too familiar with search engine optimization (SEO)? No problem: read on for some SEO basics.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves boosting your website content with key words and promoting customer engagement to enable your financial website get a higher ranking on search engines. Google, MSN, Bing, and Yahoo are the search engines currently dominating the market.
A higher ranking means that people can find your financial advisor website more readily and see what you have to offer. The traffic you get to your financial website is the number of visitors who hit (or click on) your site.
When the work of the web design firm constructing your financial professional website ends, you probably will be approached by various SEO companies who will claim they can help put your financial advisor website at the top of the search engines. Beware of scammers who con financial firms and try to wheedle more money out of them. Sometimes they offer website design along with SEO services as a package and usually at an exorbitant rate. Often times, the end result is a big fat zero. That is why you should steer clear of financial website design firms that charge a monthly rate for submitting your website to search engines. This is a ploy, because after your financial website has been submitted to Google and has the Google Analytics code embedded in the website’s code, monthly re-submission is not needed.
Optimizing Your Financial Website
Below are additional suggestions to boost search engine optimization of your site:
Avoid Flash imagery
Search engines are unable to read text in a “flash” file, which can affect the ranking of your financial website. Visitors are not visiting your financial advisor website to check out graphics – they want solutions. Keep your content solid and upload only a couple of photos on to your financial website.
Use Minimal Graphics on Each Page of Your Financial Website
As mentioned above, graphics don’t mean anything to search engines since they read only text. Use quality content and keep graphics to a minimum on each page of your financial website. Remember to use relevant keywords while writing content for each page of your website.
Add Keywords and Meta Tags on Your Website
- In meta tags, use no more than seven strong keywords per page.
- Chose a domain name with keywords for your website.
- On page titles on your website, use keywords consistent with the content of that page.
- Keyword phrases should not exceed the 5% density.
- Use keywords in ALT (image title) tags.
- Put keyword phrases first as text on the page, headers, and paragraphs on your financial advisor website. Use a “header tag” (H1, H2 tags) for primary keyword phrases on a page or for title tags on links. (A title tag is the words that you see if you scroll your mouse over a certain links possessing a title tag.) You should only place a title tag containing your keywords on one or two links.
- The descriptive ‘meta tag’ belongs in the header section of your html code and should be between 14-26 words in length. It is the financial website description that search engines will display in their search results.
- Use bold or underlined text, and link keyword phrases within the financial web page to other pages.
Register Your Domain Name for More than One Year
If you register your financial website domain for more than a year, you can get some extra points by search engines and it can boost your ranking a bit. Search engines operate on the fact that your financial planner website will be around for sometime.
Don’t Stuff Your Website with Keywords
Overloading your financial website content with keywords that exceeds the allowed density can get your website penalized and banned from all search engines.
