What is Search Engine Optimization?
You need to ensure that your financial website gets a good rank in search engines so that people spot your financial advisor webpage online and look at what you have to offer. Google, MSN, Bing, and Yahoo are currently dominating the market. You will get traffic to your financial website depending upon the number of visitors who hit the site. When the work of the web design firm (for financial professional website) ends, you will be approached by various SEO companies who will claim to put your financial advisor website at the top on the search engines. Beware of scammers who con financial firms to weasel more money out of them. They offer financial website design along with SEO services as a package at an exorbitant rate. The end result is a big fat zero. That is why you should steer clear from financial website design firms that charge a monthly rate for submitting your financial professional webpage to search engines. This is a ploy because after the financial website has been submitted to Google and has the Google Analytics code embedded in the financial planner website’s code, monthly submission is not needed.
Optimizing the Financial Website
Flash imagery on the financial advisor website is a bad idea
Search engines are unable to read text in a “flash” file, which can affect ranking of the financial website. Visitors are not hitting the financial advisor website to check out graphics – they want solutions. Keep your content solid and upload only a couple of photos on the financial website.
Use minimal graphics on each financial advisor website
As mentioned above, graphics don’t mean anything to search engines since they read text. Use quality content and keep graphics to a minimum on each page of the financial website. Remember to use relevant keywords while writing content for the financial planner website.
Include keyword terms in the financial website in these places
- Insert keywords in meta tags. Use no more than seven strong keywords per page of the financial advisor website.
- Domain name of financial professional website.
- Page titles of each page of the website for financial planners. Keywords should be consistent with the content of that page.
- Insert keyword phrases in your financial webpage content taking care not to exceed the 5% density.
- Use keywords in ALT (image title) tags.
- Put keyword phrases first as text on the page, headers, and paragraphs on the financial advisor website. Use a “header tag” (H1, H2 tags) for primary keyword phrases on a financial website page or for title tags on links. A title tag is the words that you see if you scroll your mouse over a certain links possessing a title tag. You should only place a title tag containing your keywords on just one or two links.
- The description of the financial planner website should be between 14-26 words in length. This descriptive ‘meta tag’ belongs in the header section of your html code. This is the financial website description that search engines will display in their search results.
- Use bold, underlined text and link keyword phrases within the financial webpage to other pages.
Register for more than one year
If you register your financial website domain for more than a year, you can get some extra points by search engines that can pull up your rank somewhat. Search engines operate on the fact that your financial planner website will be around for sometime.
Keyword stuffing is prohibited
Overloading the financial website content with keywords that exceeds the allowed density can get the financial planner website penalized and banned from all search engines.