NotaryBids.com Blog

We were very excited to learn today that congress passed the recent housing market rescue bill and it will soon be law. Our national network of Mobile Notary Signing Agents will be standing by and our hopes are that this will send a much needed breath of fresh air back in to the Real Estate industry! For the full story on Yahoo News follow this link or read below: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080726/pl_nm/fannie_freddie_dc_30;_ylt=AlD50derBQcQ475I4G53CK8Gw_IE

By Kevin Drawbaugh Sat Jul 26, 4:16 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress approved a massive housing market rescue bill on Saturday, offering emergency financing to mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and setting up a $300-billion fund to help hundreds of thousands of troubled homeowners.
ADVERTISEMENT

Approved by the Senate in a 72-13 vote, the election-year rescue bill was passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. President George W. Bush was expected to sign it promptly, amid doubts about how much it would help.

With foreclosures at record levels, home sales sluggish and property values down, America is in its deepest housing slump since the Great Depression.

Fears that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest U.S. mortgage companies, might collapse rattled global markets earlier this month and led the Bush administration to call for emergency measures to bolster investor confidence.

They recently lost billions of dollars on bad home loans and the stock market has whipsawed their share prices on uncertainty about whether they have enough capital.

Housing activists and scholars said this election-year bill will ease, but not end, the housing crisis.

“We have a housing market going into cardiac arrest. This bill is like CPR to stabilize the situation,” said David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an alliance of 600 community investment and development groups, estimated 2.5 million U.S. households will face foreclosure this year.

While Congress’ legislation is welcome, the coalition said, it “will likely have little effect on the foreclosure crisis gripping the financial markets and economy.”

HELP FOR FANNIE, FREDDIE

As private finance has retreated from the mortgage sector, the importance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has grown, and they own or guarantee almost half the country’s $12 trillion in outstanding home mortgage debt.

Under a provision put into the bill late in its development at the administration’s urging, Fannie and Freddie could draw on a temporary line of U.S. Treasury credit or the government could buy shares in them, if they ran into trouble.

Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said the housing bill had positive aspects. But she added, “I am troubled by the inclusion of an unlimited U.S. Treasury credit line to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” and possible government stock purchases.

The bill establishes a $300-billion fund under the Federal Housing Administration to help distressed homeowners get more affordable, government-backed mortgages and get out from under exotic mortgages they cannot afford.

The success of the temporary fund will depend on lenders’ willingness to accept losses on original loans to shift overstretched borrowers into new loans. An estimated 400,000 families could be helped by the program.

But it would not take effect until October 1 and housing activists said it might not be in full operation until 2009.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd, who steered the bill through the Senate, said the FHA fund should need “four months to get it up and running.” He said he would meet with agency officials to urge rapid implementation.

The bill sends about $4 billion in grants to communities to help them buy and repair foreclosed homes; offers tax breaks to spur home-buying; sets up the first national licensing system for mortgage brokers and loan officers; and raises the limit on the size of mortgages that federal agencies can guarantee.

NEW REGULATOR

The bill also creates a new regulator for the shareholder-owned companies with sharper teeth than the existing one, including power over their capital levels and over their executive compensation and internal financial controls, and with Federal Reserve consultation.

Because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are chartered by Congress they are often referred to as government-sponsored enterprises, which also gives them an implied government guarantee.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters after the vote he expects the bill to be sent to the White House on Monday.

“Because of the Democratic Congress’ delays and the need for action now, President Bush will sign this bill when he receives it, despite our concerns with some provisions, including nearly $4 billion to help lenders, not the homeowners this legislation is intended to serve,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Both presidential contenders Barack Obama and John McCain praised the Senate’s passage of the housing bill.

Illinois Democratic Sen. Obama said in a statement that the bill was “urgently needed” and represented “an important start to protecting homeowners and restoring stability to our housing market and our economy.”

Sen. McCain, an Arizona Republican, “believes that relief for struggling homeowners is overdue, applauds the passage of this legislation and urges the president to sign it quickly,” said McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin in a statement. (Reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh and Patrick Rucker, editing by Jackie Frank)

I finally just completed installing a feature I have been working on and off over the last year or so. I am VERY excited to announce that now when a notary search is done on NotaryBids.com the distance from the entered zip code to the notaries that are displayed is automatically calculated to help our clients choose the closest notary.

There are only a few competing sites that offer this feature which puts NotaryBids.com in the upper echelon now.

This doesn’t necessarily help us from an SEO perspective, but this is an important feature for companies looking for notaries and it will certainly help our traffic and get our notaries more business.

Working as an SEO Assistant for Vertical Measures (http://www.VerticalMeasures.com) has taught me so much about Search Engine Optimization and it has greatly increased my awareness of how important SEO is. In addition it has forced me to read tons and tons of material on the topic and I have learned so many new things. One of them is “more is not always better” when it comes to keyword tags and description tags. I have actually scaled back my keyword tags and description tags so they are much shorter and more keyword focused as a result. Just go to the home page: http://www.notarybids.com, right click anywhere and chose “view source” to see what they currently are.

File Naming For SEO

One thing I recently noticed and have read material on is file naming. For example, if you have a webpage about “search engine optimization” what is the best way to name the file (the actual page on the server). Do you name it: “SearchEngineOptimization.html” or “seo.html” or “search-engine-optimization.html”? The correct answer could be the 2nd choice but the 3rd choice is the best. Why? Search engines see words separated by a hyphen as separate words. Therefore the search engines would see the words search,engine,optimization giving you keyword relevancy whereas in the first example search engines see this: searchengineoptimizatation! Not even a legit word and no key-phrases. So remember, when creating new pages for your site be sure to name them smart and you may want to go back and review your file naming conventions for existing pages.

Latest Site Upgrades

If you recall when I first started this blog I decided on some key words and phrases I wanted to focus on to try to improve NotaryBids.com’s rank in search engines. Those included searches like “california notary“, “florida notary“, “phoenix notary” or basically location based searching with the word “notary” included. At that time I had no optimization or ability to optimize the site for those types of key words and phrases because I had no content available to work with. I decided to change the business model of the site and allow free notary searches on notarybids.com and I created content that allowed for those searches. The next step was to optimize those pages and content.

Here is a brief list of some the optimization tactics I’m using and I’ll refer to the California notary search results page as an example:

1. I dynamically list every city we have a notary in. This updates automatically as new notaries sign up
2. 1 dynamically update the title tag of the page. Note it says “CA Notary Signing Agents” rather than “California Notary Signing Agents”
3. I changed the title tags so that the keywords come first followed by the company name.
4. I added the city name followed by a comma and state after the notary name on the results list so that will get indexed
5. I referenced the full spelling of the state name several times so that the page is optimized for the full name and abbreviation
6. You’ll note that if you click on the city names to be taken to the corresponding city on the list. If you are familiar with your “status bar” on your browser look closely at the URL you will be taken to. The end of the URL will show the city name and the word “NOTARY”. That is no accident. The search engines will see all those URL’s and index them. My hopes are that will improve our rank for searches performed for a notary in a certain city. Time will tell…
7. The URL of the page is: http://www.notarybids.com/california-mobile-notary.asp?state=CA&stateName=California Remember what I said earlier about file naming? Also note all the keywords in the URL.

50 New pages Added, The Big Kahuna!

One of the things that helps your rank in search engines is the number of pages your site has indexed. In other words, big sites rank better! Blogs and forums are a great way to continually add pages and pages of content to your site. I’ve noticed the sites that rank highest for our keywords have very active forums and pages and pages of content. Forums in particular are great because your user community adds the content and pages for you and helps you grow the site 24/7. I don’t have any plans to add a forum at this time but I know for a fact this blog helps our ranks. Here is what I did do that I am particularly excited about. Previously when a free notary search was performed on the site there was one page that handled all the results and that page dynamically generated the content based on parameters passed like the state name. Rather than using one page I decided to copy that page 50 times (1 for each state) so that every state had it’s own page! That way the URL of the page could be more relevant and the content on the page could be specific to that state which should make a more effective page being indexed in the search engines. We shall see…

Google’s “cached” version of your website pages

In case you didn’t know, the way Google works is it takes a snapshot of your web pages when ever it’s “spyder” affectionately known as Googlebot crawls your site. The last time that snapshot was taken is the “cache date”. Google allows you to view the snapshot and the date it was taken which is very helpful when optimizing your site because you can track how effective the changes you make are in conjunction with monitoring your position in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

As of today the cached version of notarybids.com is dated April 10th. I expect Googlebot to crawl the site again any day. I’ve noticed the cache date is usually about a week off. I’m very anxious to see how the newly revised home page, new optimized search pages and the addition of the 50 new pages affects our rank.

Until then, stay tuned!

- Chris

Why Computers Sometimes Crash! By Dr. Seuss.

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is
interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory
makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an
error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the
double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data
is corrupted ’cause the index doesn’t hash, then your situation’s
hopeless and your syste m’s gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the
network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets
want to tunnel to another protocol, that’s repeatedly rejected by
the printer down the hall……

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so
your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as
well reboot and go out with a bang, ‘cuz sure as I’m a poet, the
sucker’s gonna hang.

When the copy on your floppy’s getting sloppy in the disk, and
the macro code instructions cause unwanted risk, then you’ll have
to flash the BIOS and you’ll want to RAM your ROM, just quickly
turn the darn thing off and run to tell your Mom!

I came across this post on another blog recently and I did not make a note of the blog address so I could give credit where it is due, However I felt this is an excellent list of best practices when starting your website or making it more search engine friendly. Enjoy!

Domain Name

Your domain name should be about your product, not about you. It should say “www.widgets.whatever”, not “www.the-great-us.whatever”.
Where you make blue widgets and your keyword research has established that people are indeed searching in quantity for the term blue widgets, then your domain name should be “www.blue-widgets.whatever”. Use of the hyphen is deliberate. Engines see hyphens as a separator between words. Don’t forget, the human eye can seewordsjoineduptogether as being words joined up together. An engine can’t do that. We can’t have spaces in domain names though (a technical thing) so the obvious compromise is to separate the words in the domain name by a hyphen. Not by a dot (.) or by an underscore (_), but by a hyphen (-).

File Name

Again, blue-widgets.htm or .html, .php or .asp, (or whatever according to format) for preference.

Title Tag

Your subject or service should be first, your company name second, if at all. Remember, if you’re Joe Blow and you make widgets, the public will be searching for widgets, not Joe Blow. They never heard of you to look for you, right? So the layout is as follows; “Blue Widgets from Joe Blow Services, the Best of the Blue Widget Makers.”

Description Meta Tag

Same rules; product first, your name second. So it’s “Blue Widgets Customized to Your Specification, from Joe Blow, Home of the Quality Widget. Also, it needs to be long enough for Google to be able to fashion a decent-sized snippet from it. If it’s too short, only a few words long, Google will look elsewhere on the page to source its snippet. This means you relinquish some control over what appears there.

Keywords Meta Tag

Blue,Widgets,Quality,Specifications” etc. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to shovel in every possible related word you can think of, I’ve seen sites that have lines and lines of these, the same ones on every page. A few pertinent ones on every page please, with variations according to the content of the specific page. Separate them either by commas or by spaces, not by both. It used to be said that you only need to include any one keyword once as the engines would parse them into any possible phrases. Lately there are suggestions that Yahoo wants to see comma-separated phrases. perhaps it would be as well to include just that.

Head

Javascripts and CSS styles usually go in here. They need to be externalized into an external file and referenced accordingly. I used to not bother with either a doc type or a charset but I include both religiously now as validation lately receives wider acceptance as important.

Header Tag

There’s several Header Tags, varying from Most Important (H1) to Least Important (H6). Your keyword or key phrase need to be the first words in the first Header Tag, which should be an H1 tag. The tags should be used in order of descending importance, i.e., your first tag should be the H1 tag and each following tag should be in series, use next a single H2 tag or a series of H2 tags. Don’t start with an H3 tag, then use an H1 tag etc. This will just confuse the engines about the relative importance of your site’s content.

First Paragraph

First words in the first paragraph are your key phrase.

Bold

They’re in “bold”. Or “strong”.

Text Content

Sprinkled liberally throughout your page is your key phrase. If it feels right, then it is. If it feels right and it’s only mentioned twice in a 10,000 word document, and it feels right, then it is right. It’s the document that’s wrong. You’ve written a document that, let’s face it, can’t include your key phrase to any great extent because your document isn’t actually about the subject, is it? You may have started out with the right intentions, but you seem to have got lost along the way. I’ve done it - no reason why you shouldn’t either. Perhaps you can take this page, run a keyword analyzer over it and find out what it’s actually about then you can use it as a related page in your site. Remember, you’ll always need more content. Home, asleep in bed, you’ll always need more content. To sum up, if it’s mentioned ten times in a document that’s one thousand words long, and it feels right, then it is.

Graphic Content

Keep your graphic file names brief and inclusive of a keyword. Alt tags for ordinary graphics are lately being considered relevant again for seo purposes so it’s best to include a keyword.

Internal Graphic Links

Remember that in a graphic used as a link the alt text counts for seo purposes just as normal anchor text does in a text link. Alt=”widget site - large blue widget” would be preferable to alt=”here is a picture of me and Sharon at the beach on holiday in Blackpool last year and if you look closely, you can see I’m holding a widget”.

Internal Text Links

Use keywords in the anchor text throughout. Don’t link to “home” link to “blue widgets home”. Who searches for “home”?
Don’t link to “seminars”, link to “blue widget seminars”. Who searches for “seminars”? Include your keywords in your links. Take this important opportunity to remind the engines what your site is about.

Headers/Footers

Notice the layout of the pages here? I use the same sets of links in the header and the footer. This gets them all in twice (at time of writing - the site expands almost daily so I’ll have to re-think soon) and it’s perfectly legitimate.

Tables

If you’re going to use the traditional table layout, remember to build your table so that the actual main content appears to the engines before the list of links to the left does. Search Engines will expect important information to appear first. This won’t be so important if all your links include related keywords as I advise above, but it’s still worth bearing in mind.

First let’s talk about the business model. When I started NotaryBids.com my thoughts were that if I was an Escrow agent or Title company I would much rather find a way to have notaries contact me rather than me having to make phone calls. Woudn’t you agree? Take a look at this graphic depiction of how notarybids.com saves our clients time and money:

Makes perfect sense when you look at it that way right? I think so…

I never planned for NotaryBids.com to be a “free directory” like numerous other sites out there like 123notary.com and notaryrotary.com If you recall my goal is to get more traffic and more business coming to NotaryBids.com and our notaries. To that end I’ve decided to take a calculated risk and change our business model so that we now offer 2 distinctly different ways for our clients to find notaries. The first is our core service based on the graphic above. The client enters a zipcode, chooses the best local notaries then submits the signing details and have notaries send a bid. The 2nd is a free search clients can perform and then call notaries from the resulting list. The home page now supports both services. If you have not seen it yet check out the new updated notarybids.com home page.

The change to the home page was not just to add the new service but I did a complete redesign based on what I have learned about Search Engine Optimization. Studies have proven that when people view a web page they start from the top left of the page, scan to the right, then down to the left. With this in mind I moved the zip code entry form from the center of the page to the top left portion of the page (as this is what will be seen first), then to the right I placed a new short summary about NotaryBids.com and below that 2 links to start a notary search using either of the 2 methods.

In the lower center I added a clickable list of states a searcher can click to see a list of notaries in that state sorted by city and their contact info. Based on my keyword research this feature should improve our search results when a city or state is entered and the word “notary” however there is still much work to be done.

In the bottom left I added a new “Most Popular Searches” box that contains links directly to the most common cities & states searchers look for notaries. Searchers can see a list of notaries and their contact info in that area with just 1 click.

One of the main features I realize clients need is a system that shows how far away each notary is from their target signing location. To my knowledge, only notaryrotary.com and signingagent.com offer this. Well I am excited to announce that soon notarybids.com will have it too! I was working on this over the weekend and I have the code working that calculates the distance in miles from an entered zip code to the zip code of the notary on the list!. However I am not ready to add it to the site yet because I still have to figure out how to sort the resulting notary list by closest to farthest. That’s going to be rough!!!

Some other recent changes include:

• another change to the home page title tag, “Mobile Notary Signing Agent Search System”
• changed the color scheme slightly on the main menu sub menus to make it more easily readable
• some notaries and clients may not notice the login area at the top of every page so I changed the main menu to now include a “LOGIN” option
• added a “START/JOIN” option on the main menu (not sure about this one yet)
• increased the size of the font from 10pt to 11pt site wide (I always thought it was too small)

and a few other miscellaneous changes.

With these changes, and upgrades I believe the site is becoming more “search engine friendly”, more usable and more valuable to the industry but there is still much more work to be done.
- Chris

I’m pleased to announce some exciting changes I made recently to the home page, the home page title tag as well as to the home page keywords (by keywords I mean the keywords tag in the html) and the description tag in the html also. I also made a slight change to the “Theme” of the company which could also be considered the tagline. Keep in mind this is all in line with a new SEO Strategy we developed in earlier posts to bring the site up higher in the search engines.

Title, Description, Keyword Tags

Lets start out by showing you what these actually look like from the code in the page:

This is what the “title” tag looks like: <TITLE>NotaryBids.com - Home, An Automated Mobile Notary Signing Agent Search System</TITLE>

This what the “keywords” tag looks like: <meta name=“keywords” content=”Mobile Notary,Signing Agent,Notary Signing Agentr,Mobile Signing Agent,Certified Signing Agent,Notary Database,Notary Search,Notary Locator,National Notary,Notary Directory,Notaries,Alabama Notary,Alaska Notary,Arizona Notary,Arkansas Notary,California Notary,Colorado Notary,Connecticut Notary,Delaware Notary,District of Columbia Notary,Florida Notary,Georgia Notary,Hawaii Notary,Idaho Notary,Illinois Notary,Indiana Notary,Iowa Notary,Kansas Notary,Kentucky Notary,Louisiana Notary,Maine Notary,Maryland Notary,Massachusetts Notary,Michigan Notary,Minnesota Notary,Mississippi Notary,Missouri Notary,Montana Notary,Nebraska Notary,Nevada Notary,New Hampshire Notary,New Jersey Notary,New Mexico Notary,New York Notary,North Carolina Notary,North Dakota Notary,Ohio Notary,Oklahoma Notary,Oregon Notary,Pennsylvania Notary,Rhode Island Notary,South Carolina Notary,South Dakota Notary,Tennessee Notary,Texas Notary,Utah Notary,Vermont Notary,Virginia Notary,Washington Notary,West Virginia Notary,Wisconsin Notary,Wyoming Notary” />

This is what the description tags look like: <meta name=“description” content=”NotaryBids.com is an innovative, new, completely automated national notary signing agent search system. Our automation saves lenders, title companies, escrow companies and others time and money by locating and contacting mobile notary signing agents for them!” />

In any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy this is the first place you need to start!

Here are some best practices for these 3 very important components:

• Use a unique description for each page. Make sure the description does in fact describe the page content. But write it with the search engines in mind. Depending on the search engine it may be what people see as a summary of your site on the search engine results pages. (SERPS) Also be sure to load it contains your keywords.
• The title should contain the website name “NotaryBids.com”, the page name or purpose and then a short description including keywords as to what the page is about. Keep in mind your visitirs will see this in the top of the browser.
• The keywords list should include all the possible keywords your site is about starting with the most important and separated by a comma. Spend some time on this one and be sure you have a solid list of keywords (you can also include short 2 -3 word phrases) that a person that is searching may use to find your product or service.

Next lets talk about the other changes/upgrades I made to the home page. The first and most noticeable one is the list of states you can now find there. I decided to make a change to the overall business plan to support a much more aggressive search marketing plan. I am now allowing public access to the notary database similar to what other notary directory sites allow. In simpler terms that means someone that needs a notary can come to the website and with a few clicks find a notary and view their contact info. This is a big step but should help bring more business to our notaries.

From an SEO perspective the change added many important keywords to our home page, the states! During the development of the list I also created a new page that lists the most popular states and cities where notaries are needed more often. You can view the new Find A Notary By State or Popular City feature by clicking this link. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

These two pages and more I’ll be adding add terrific new content and keywords to the site along with some desired functionality clients look for!

- Chris

It occurred to me today that I forgot to share one very important fact about this effort.  THIS BLOG is part of my my overall strategy!  Creating this blog, promoting it and doing regular posts to it are an important part of SEO for several reasons. 1) Link building, look over this blog and you will see tons of links to NotaryBids.com.  Each of those links helps…2) Blogs have powerful tools and features designed specifically for SEO like RSS, Pinging services (check out the menu to the left) and just the well known fact that blogs get indexed very quickly in search engines because the content constantly changes.

An interesting note slightly off topic: As of today this Blog is showing a Page Rank 3 and it has only been in  existence less than a month!  That may have something to do with why NotaryBids.com seems to have made a jump up in the search results.

In conclusion, if you don’t have a blog get one!  Just go to WordPress.com to use their hosted solution or WordPress.org to download the script (like this blog) and install it on your own web server.  There are also hundreds of WordPress Themes to choose from for just the right look.  If you find you would like to install your own WordPress blog like I did but need assistance feel free to contact me and I will assist you.

Back on 3/16 I captured the stats on the “Stats/Progress” Page. Today I ran the numbers again to see where we are. Honestly I had not actually done anything yet to affect the numbers but there were some strange results! Results that to me don’t give me much trust in the accuracy of the numbers.

Here is what I found: Yahoo Site Explorer is reporting 33 LESS links to NotaryBids.com from other sites. What happened did 33 sites close down this last week?

Yahoo Site Explorer is reporting 6 less pages on the NotaryBids.com web site! Now cmon…I did not delete 6 pages this week!

Google Toolbar back link checker is reporting just 17 back links to NotaryBids.com (sites that link to NotaryBids.com) YET when I Google “notarybids.com” as of today the number of results has increased from 349 to 518…169 MORE! So, how can the back link checker say only 17 sites link to NotaryBids.com yet there are 518 mentions of NotaryBids.com on the web. Granted some of those are the NotaryBids.com site but as we already know there are no more than 40 pages on the site. I did actually browse some of the results and they are legit.

Lastly but certainly not least is Alexa. Somehow NotaryBids.com managed to lose 104,620 points in their ranking system this week.

Here’s the wrap up… it’s still early. Maybe these are normal fluctuations. I will just have to wait and see. For now I’m not going to put too much weight on the first week of monitoring.

One thing I have learned this week though in reading tons and tons of SEO blogs and forums. If you want long tern sustainable results content is king. So along with my plans to optimize the site for City/State Notary searches I will be focusing on adding good solid content to the site.

It’s Friday night about 10:45 pm, time for a cocktail!

- Chris

After spending time first building a list using the Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool then taking that list and further analyzing it with the excellent keyword research tool at KeywordDiscovery.com AND also analyzing the site that holds the illustrious 1st place in Google search results for the keyphrase: “mobile notary” (www.notaryone.net) I have decided on my 8 keywords and keyphrases I will optimize the notarybids.com website around!

But before we talk about them lets spend a few minutes talking about notaryone.net.

For most people, 1st position in the serps (Search Engine Results Page) is just a dream. Lets look at how notaryone.com did it. If you haven’t done it already, go there and look at the page. Not very impressive huh? There are a few things I noticed immediately, 1) at the very top of the page, each State in the United States is listed as a link. When you click on the link it takes you to a page that has links to certain cities in that state (these appear to be states where they have a notary registered in that state), but strangely below those are the names of each city in that state listed but those are not links. If you look even more carefully you will notice that some of the cities (that are not links) are followed by the word “notary”. My guess is the cities are getting added manually and maybe the owner of the site either forgot to include “notary” after some or he is purposefully not putting it after each city because that could be considered keyword spamming by the search engines. Below that there is some obviously copied and pasted text giving the visitor a little history lesson on that state. Personally I think it’s there just to make the page look more legit. 2) The 2nd thing I noticed is that down the left column of all pages is a series of repetitive links that say “how to become a notary in <state here>”. During my keyword research I noticed “how to become a notary” is an extremely popular search term. My guess is the site owner knows this as well and that is the reason for that approach. Currently NotaryOne.com is ranked 5th in Google for the search term: “become a mobile notary”. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what you think of all that but my personal opinion is this is what we call a “landing page” which is a page that serves no purpose but to do well in the search engines.

Ok, since this is not a blog about that site lets move on to the keywords I chose and why.

1. mobile notary (although there is a lot of competition for this one, it’s a necessity)
2. california notary (average to low competition, HIGH demand! This searcher is looking for a notary in California which is the most requested state)
3. florida notary (average to low competition, HIGH demand! This searcher is looking for a notary in Florida which is the 2nd largest requested state.)
4. national notary (average to high competition average demand. Someone using this search term would be a company looking for a national provider of mobile notary signing agents)
5. loan signing agent (average to high competition, average demand. Although a somewhat generic term, someone looking for a loan signing agent)
6. signing services (average competition, average demand. Typically this would be someone with a regular need for notary services)
7. find a notary (average competition, average demand. Clearly someone looking for a notary)
8. loan signing agents (average to low competition, average demand. A person or company looking for notaries that specialize in loan signings)

So here’s the strategy… you may be asking yourself “why “California and Florida”. Well the big picture strategy is that ALL major states and MOST major cities PLUS the word “notary” are the most common search terms used with the least amount of competition. A competitor is defined as another company trying to capture that searchers business. So I am going to redesign the notarybids.com website so that it’s pages are optimized for key phrases like “california notary”, “florida notary”, “new jersey notary” and also major cities as well like “los angeles notary”, orlando notary” and “newark notary”. In addition, the other key phrases above will be used as often and as many times as possible on as many pages as well. A focus will always be to provide the most useful and relevant content possible because that is the way to ensure long term success with Google and the other search engines!

Ultimately my goal will be that whenever someone looking for a notary by state or city does a Google search, the corresponding notarybids.com page will come up or the notarybids.com home page will come up in the first page of the SERPs.

Later I will also develop pages with content that is useful and relevant for each of the other key phrases as well.

The next phase is to start the redesign process of the site. Stay tuned!