NotaryBids.com Blog

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

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!

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.