NotaryBids.com Blog

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