Are Spiders Affecting Your Mortgage Marketing Results?

By: Tom Domin

Yes...there are bugs that can affect your marketing and you don't need a pest exterminator to resolve the problem. Now, if you're a little lost at this point that's OK...this article is definitely for you and may explain why you're not generating any mortgage leads from your website.

What are Spiders?

Spiders are software programs that are specifically designed to crawl the World Wide Web, gather data (hence the term Spider) and then send it back to their databases. This is how Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and a host of others, gather data about you, me, and our websites. They constantly travel the Internet collecting data and sending it back to their parent database.

Using the Google Spider as an example, when the Spider finds your website it will look for key words that indicate the purpose of the website. It may find "mortgage," or "first time homebuyer," or "refinance," and it then sends that information back to Google coupled with your website address. Google evaluates, rates, and then indexes the information it receives and now your website (www.yourname.com) is listed in the Google database as having something to do with "mortgage" and "first time homebuyer" and "refinance," simply because those words appeared on your web pages.

Just as a side note...The Google Spider is so efficient and so thorough, that your website will be indexed and listed in as little as three days (usually seven to ten days) after you post content on your web page.

Now...every time someone uses a search engine and types in "mortgage" or "first time homebuyer," or "refinance," your website pops up in the search results and your shopper can click on your link and then visit your website.

Sorry...I'm afraid not!

Consider this...the last time I used Google with "mortgage" as the search term, it took .19 seconds to return 154,000,000 results. Therein lies the problem...there are just too many web pages. There's no point having your web page ranked 153,999,067, because people just aren't going to find you before their eyes begin to fail.

You need improve your rankings and move your web page closer to the top. Spiders use a code called relevancy. Relevancy means that if your website doesn't have the word "mortgage" anywhere then your page won't come up when someone types "mortgages" or "first time homebuyers" in the search string.

The key to being found in cyberspace is developing a site that is friendly to Spiders. If you want to be placed at the top of search engines for mortgage customers, then you need to make it easy for a Spider to log you and your relevance. Easy to log means having your key words like "mortgage" and "first time homebuyers" appear throughout your web page. If a Spider compares two web pages to determine relevancy rankings, which site would be ranked higher, a site that had the word "mortgage" appear once, or one where "mortgage" appears numerous times near the beginning of the page?

Now, you need to be careful here. If you flood your site with key words just to be found, most Spiders can recognize that old trick and it's very possible that you'll be penalized and your site will be black-balled and erased from the database. One nice thing about Spiders...once they find you, they continually return to your web page checking and documenting changes you may have made since the last visit. You'll find some Spiders (Google for example), returns to your site every single day, collects data and analyzes it.

Although the actual logarithm used by the Spiders is a deep dark secret (much like the Coke recipe), we do know that the following points are an integral part of the equation:

Relevancy - Is your website dedicated to selling cars and trucks, home improvement supplies, or mortgages. Your key words indicate to the Spider the website's purpose.

Key word density and frequency - How many times your key words appear and exactly how they appear is important to Spiders. Remember, key word flooding is a no no.

Content and information - Spiders follow all the links on your website indexing the information and articles you have placed there as well as additions, deletions, and changes. You need to talk about mortgages and not how great you and your company are. The more content the better.

Links pointing back to your website - Back links are extremely important to Spiders and can improve your website ranking significantly. Writing and publishing mortgage articles is definitely the answer. Don't forget to include your resource box with a link back to your website. Articles not only provide back links, they provide valuable content improving your website's position. Use your City and State in your article title and you'll improve it even more.

Some studies have shown that over 95% of all who have access to the Internet use Search Engines to help find their information. A good first step is to design and implement your website around the search terms your customers will be using and your chances of being found will increase dramatically.

Article Source: http://www.articleblender.com

Tom Domin is the author of "101 Ways to Originate Mortgages" and publisher of "Tom's Mortgage Tips" a twice monthly Mortgage Newsletter geared for Mortgage Professionals. Increase your pipeline and put your mortgage career on the fast track and sign-up for FREE at www.MortgageMarketingToolKit.com.

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