Pre-Optimization: It is critically important that you know what keywords to target in your SEO / Mortgage Marketing Campaign. If you engage in a Mortgage SEO Campaign without carefully targeting the correct keywords, your internet mortgage lead generation results may be significantly decreased or non-existent. Keyword selection is a vital part of any SEO Campaign and there is little to no room for error. A Keyword Research Report provides the detailed analysis you need to target the correct keywords and help improve the overall effectiveness of your Mortgage SEO Marketing Campaign.

Mortgage Keyword Analysis and Reporting

Keyword research is the basis of all Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and Search Engine Marketing Campaigns (SEM). The accurate identification and careful selection of important keywords and key phrases related to your target market can literally make or break any mortgage website or online marketing campaign.

Pre-Optimization Analysis: Before you begin adding content and engaging in an active SEO / SEM Mortgage Marketing Campaign, it is important that you address the current state of your mortgage website with an analysis on the current state of SEO on your website.This can and will affect your future SEO efforts and mortgage lead generation efforts.

To obtain high search engine rankings, generate traffic and generate leads, your website needs to be optimized for the keyword phrases you are targeting. Good content on an optimized site with quality inbound links is the proven formula for being highly ranked on the major search engines.

SEO – Internet Mortgage Marketing Basics

Why? Search engines like websites that show consistent natural growth and favor websites that have quality links pointing to them. Search engines reward sites exhibiting such growth with high rankings, which in turn leads to greater traffic and increased mortgage lead generation.

How? The primary techniques used in marketing your website and Mortgage SEO are creating unique content (new pages) on your website and creating quality links to this content through link building. Link building is accomplished by submitting your mortgage website and content to relevant directories, social bookmarking sites, article directories and blogs increase links back to your site and thus help to improve search engine rankings and optimize Internet Mortgage Lead Generation efforts.

How Long Does Mortgage SEO Take? Keep in mind that just like direct mail or any other type of mortgage marketing, an SEO Marketing Campaign requires a sustained and disciplined effort. Mortgage SEO is a long term internet marketing strategy with lasting results that requires an investment of money and time (6 to 12 months) to realize results in the form of leads generated on your website. In contrast, Pay-Per-Click or PPC campaigns (where you advertise on search engines and pay for each click you receive to your website) are a short term strategy where you are only as good as your last bid.

How To Choose Your Keywords

Keywords are the heart of Mortgage SEO and online mortgage lead generation. Each new page of unique content we create is optimized for a 2 to 5 word keyword phrase. This is the phrase we want to rank well for on the Search Engine Results pages of the top search engines.

1. Choose targeted or niche keywords and avoid broad keywords. The more target or focused your keywords are on niche search terms, the more success you will have. There is simply too much competition for keyword terms like “mortgage refinance” or “home equity loans” and you will not have success with these phrases. Targeting “Oregon mortgage refinance” or “oakland home equity loans” is a different story though.
2. Find out if people are searching for the terms you want to optimize for.The downside of avoiding broad search terms is that more targeted niche search terms will tend to have less volume associated with them. That being said, they are also much less competitive and even if there are only 25 searches a day for a keyword term, if you rank in the top ten for that word, you may have 5 to 15 qualified visiting your website from that search term alone.

Mortgage Keyword Tools

• Use this Keyword Volume Tool and this Keyword Tool to measure search volume for candidate keyword search terms.
• Use the Google Keyword Tool to research keyword search phrases.
• Use the LeadPress Mortgage Keyword Tool to research keyword search phrases.

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*Every LeadPress Mortgage Website has SEO Optimized architecture and tools out of the box to insure you get the highest rankings possible in search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

The Two Components that Make Up Search Engine Optimization

On-Page Optimization – Refers to the changes made to the code and content of each page of a mortgage website to increase search engine rankings and optimize Internet Mortgage Lead Generation efforts.

Off-Page Optimization – Refers to the process of marketing your Mortgage Lead Generation Website (otherwise known as internet marketing or search engine marketing, or Mortgage SEO) by using different marketing strategies to build external links to your mortgage web site. The number of external links pointing to your mortgage website is one of the most important metrics used by search engines to gauge the importance of your website and assign your mortgage website a ranking on the search results page. Higher rankings translate into increased traffic and increased internet mortgage lead generation. Off-page optimization consists of adding unique content (new pages) to your mortgage website and then building quality external links from other websites to this content.

Link Building

What is Link Building? When Website A creates a link on their website pointing to Website B, a one way link to Website A has been created. Building one-way links to your mortgage website from other websites (Link Building) is the most effective way to improve your search engine rankings and mortgage lead generation.

Link building and internet mortgage broker marketing campaigns are a necessary investment for any mortgage company that is serious about generating exclusive mortgage leads. Link building campaigns are a long term strategy that take time to execute and have lasting results, unlike Cost Per Click Campaigns that will only be as effective as your last bid. Link building provides long term results that continue to grow as you gain momentum. Link building is a key component in generating traffic to your mortgage broker website or loan officer website and generating mortgage leads consistently.

Why Build Links? The primary way that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are able to assign an importance or ranking to your website is by counting the number of websites that have linked to your website. When a website links to you, they are saying that they found your website important or relevant enough to link to and in doing so, have essentially given your website of vote of confidence. The more votes or links you obtain, the higher your website will rank in the search engines and the more leads you will generate.

How Do I Build Links? The most cost-effective and effective link building and internet mortgage marketing strategies consist of creating unique content, articles, and press releases on your website and then creating links to this content. Link building techniques consist of submitting your website and content to relevant directories, social bookmarking sites, article directories, press release websites, and blogs where it is then published. Once published, this content is viewed by a wider web audience and contains links back to your website that help improve search engine rankings and optimize Internet Mortgage Lead Generation efforts. Other websites will then publish your content from these sites, adding yet more one way links back to you website. Additionally, submitting your website to high ranking directories and social bookmarking sites will also create valuable links back to your website.

Quality Of Links. Keep in mind that all links are not created the same. Sound link-building practices call for building links from quality websites with topic relevant material. A link from a well respected website that has already achieved credibility with search engines may be worth more to your site than 500 links from lesser known websites. This means that it is also important to obtain links from as many high ranked websites as possible. Quality is more important than quantity in Mortgage SEO for mortgage lead generation purposes.

MortgageSEO Timeline

How Long Does SEO Take? Keep in mind that just like direct mail or any other type of mortgage marketing, an SEO Mortgage Marketing Campaign requires a sustained and disciplined effort. You wouldn’t just send one batch of direct mail out and then just stop, and the same is the same for Mortgage SEO efforts.

Creation of unique content and link building on a regular basis are necessary for long term mortgage marketing strategies such as a Mortgage SEO Campaign. Mortgage SEO is a long term internet marketing strategy with lasting results that requires an investment of money and time (6 to 12 months) to realize results in the form of leads generated on your website.

Basic On Page Mortgage SEO Components

(Included in all LeadPress Mortgage Websites)

Mortgage Keyword Optimization – Mortgage SEO requires that all pages are optimized for specific mortgage keyword combinations. The meta-tags, header tags, alt tags, url, and content of each page should use these relevant mortgage keywords throughout to create highly optimized mortgage related content pages. Keyword optimization is a key component of Mortgage SEO and the generation of mortgage leads.

Meta-Tags – The title, keyword, and description tags on each page should be optimized for specific mortgage keyword search terms relevant to the specific content of each page for the highest search engine and mortgage lead generation results possible.

Directory / URL Structure / Interlink Structure – The website directory / architecture should be set up in a manner that is intuitive to users, well organized and utilizes keyword rich anchor text in all internal links.

Sitemap – First and foremost, it provides links to every page in the site so that even crawling is more easily achieved. It is also a way for users to view a map of all of your website content if they cannot find what they are looking for. It can serve as the page that all 404 and related errors go to when a bad url is typed in by a customer. This insures that upon reaching a an error page, they don’t see a blank screen, but your sitemap to help get them back on track.

XML / Text Sitemaps – These sitemaps are not visible, but reside in the root directory on the server. The XML sitemap provides search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN with a map of your site to make sure that search engines are aware of all pages on your website.

Header Tags – All H1, H2, and H3 tags should be optimized for the mortgage keywords that each page is targeting. This optimization is another way to help insure the highest search engine rankings and internet mortgage lead generation possible.

Alt Tags- These are the tags associated with the graphics or images on your website. They should be optimized them for search relevant and content relevant mortgage keywords on each page based on page content.

.htaccess File / Cannonicalization – Many people are not aware that search engines sometimes look at mortgagewebsite.com and www. mortgagewebsite.com differently. Sometimes they index the two pages as separate pages and will split the importance or ranking of your page between the two, essentially cutting your rankings potential in half. The same is true for pages ending with or without “/” at the end of the page.

To alleviate this issue, the .htaccess file divert all inquiries to the same version of the page so that there is consistency among search indexed pages within the search engines and only one version of each page indexed as opposed to multiple versions with and without the “www” and “/”.

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