NotaryBids.com Blog

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!

I thought this was a great article primarily for the digiXmas Directory Submitter Product although the others are useful also. A popular method of link building is through directory submission. It can be a tedious, repetitive process if you cut and paste your site information from a document or type in your site’s information for each directory. Here are three tools to help you submit your sites and three places to find web directories.

3 Tools to Quickly Submit Your Sites to Web Directories

Enjoy!

- Chris

Although I have a general idea of what keywords are relevant to Notarybids.com it’s time to choose more carefully and start optimizing the site and specific pages to target searches done using those keywords. Since NotaryBids.com is a provider of mobile notary services and loan document signing services I will be targeting keywords and phrases that people would commonly use to find mobile notary services and loan document signing services. To do this I decided to use the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool I like it because it suggests tons of keywords and also shows you a side by side comparison of how much advertiser competition there is and how much search volume there is for each keyword or key phrase. With this information my goal is to find the keywords/phrases that have the lowest advertiser competition and the highest search volume.

Basic Keywords

Initially I am going to identify the basic keywords searchers may use that could lead to NotaryBids.com. Those are: notary, notaries, certified, mobile, loan, signing, agent, document, traveling, public, national, nationwide, service. Some of these are too generic to use by themselves but we will get in to that later.

Key Phrases

Next I’m going to identify the key phrases that would be considered the most popular used by searchers. Those are: mobile notary, mobile signing agent, certified signing agent, mobile notary signing agent, mobile notary agent, loan signing, certified loan signing agent, certified notary, traveling notary public. I hand picked these from the Intial Keywords Report I created as the most widely used with the least amount of competition. One thing I noticed is that in many cases the key phrases people are using to search are either state specific or major city specific and many times they are abbreviated. For example:”ca notary”, “fl notary”, Phoenix notary”, Portland notary”. The beauty of these key phrases is that there is little to NO competition at all for those so I am already forming a strategy in which I will be adding new content (pages) to the site with the focus on those key phrases. Cool stuff!

Singular & Plural

Another strategy to employ is the plural version of the main keywords and phrases. Google looks at “signing agent” & “signing agents” differently. For certain keywords and phrases we will consider the plural version relevant and necessary also.

Misspellings

Although many times searchers misspell words the search engines do a pretty good job of correcting them. Based on my research there is not much to gain by using misspelled versions of keywords so I wont bother.

What’s next?

My next post will discuss the discovery process of identifying the core terms or phrases (Themes) that individual web pages will be developed around.

Blogs have become very well known for their impact on SEO. Search engines love them! Forums also…I have witnessed this first hand via Google Alerts. A few nights ago I did a post on a forum site and within an hour I received a Google Alert about that post! Crazy…I have wanted to start blogging for quite a while and I have messed around with it some (like my ActiveRain Blog) but I didn’t really know what to blog about that I was passionate about and what would also fuel my business interests.

Recently I met Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures (www.VerticalMeasures.com) and I started learning fascinating information about how professional SEO (Search Engine Optimzation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) companies do what they do. I guess you could call this information “secret” but it’s all available on the Internet. You just have to know where to find it and what actually works and what doesn’t. I won’t be giving away all the secrets but I will be sharing enough information where you may want to stop back by from time to time. In addition, you also have to know what NOT to do because there are some shady tactics out there commonly referred to as “Black Hat” (super shady) and Grey Hat (Questionable) that may get you removed from Google’s index or possibly Yahoo. OUCH!

This blog is going to serve several purposes for me, NotaryBids.com, our notaries and our clients. The first is it in itself will improve NotaryBids.com’s position in search engines by adding numerous pertinent links from this blog to the notarybids.com site. That means more traffic and exposure which means more business for us and our notaries. It will also have “fresh” content on a regular basis which the search engines also love. Secondly it will be an ongoing diary of where the NotaryBids.com site is ranked in the search engines starting from this post to the day we are listed on the first page of search engines based on our key word and key phrases (I hope!). My hopes are that others will find this blog useful and interact with me and each other about this topic so we can all share ideas and learn from each other. Finally, the effort I am about to undertake will provide a working environment to implement all the awesome knowledge I am gaining about SEO, SEM and web site publicity.

So, here we go! Wish us luck…

- Chris