SEO for Insurance Websites

Thanks (from an SEO novice!)
So...how do you get the carriers to do a citation/backlink???
 
Some insurance companies will give you a page that your clients can visit to use to generate quotes.

You will probably have the option of placing your URL on the page. If so, it might have some SEO value.

However, it will be an orphan page. It won't be linked to from any other page on the insurance company's site. This means that Google isn't likely to find it.

If you link to it, you might be able to get it indexed. You won't be able to get it indexed if it is blocked by their robots.txt file or uses a noindex meta tag.

Don't waste a home page link on it, you can link from a blog post or even an article. You are not trying to give it any Google juice. You are just trying to tell Google that the page exists.

Once it is indexed, it may pass some link juice back to your site.
 
2. Before you get started with offsite seo such as link building/blog commenting/social networking etc... you MUST do a good job with your onsite SEO. This means having the correct title tags, H1 and H2 tags, having a strong meta description (Not meta tags, but description), having some decent keyword density for your search terms and having lots of content. This is the best way (Aside from content) that you indicate to the search engines exactly what your site is about.

I read somewhere that meta data doesn't could so much any more . . can you confirm this?
 
The meta description is what generally shows up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

(If a page doesn't have a description, the search engine will grab body text it deems relevant to the query. The text it grabs probably won't be good sales copy.)

Descriptions are not supposed to affect ranking directly, but it affects your click through percentage.

Your description can qualify visitors and therefore reduce your bounce rate. This indirectly affects ranking. If, based on your description, visitors think something is on your page that isn't they are more likely to hit their back button. Conversely, if your description attracts more visitors who do find what they want, they are less likely to bounce. The percentage of visitors who hit their back button is a key ranking signal.

Each page on your site should have a unique description. This is also true for title tags. Duplicating your title tags and descriptions can keep pages from ranking.

You should write your description much like you would write a classified ad or a PPC ad. You have approximately 150 characters to compel someone to click through to your site from a Google SERP.

Yahoo! allows about 167 characters, but since you can't do separate descriptions for each search engine, make sure that you tell the whole story in the first 150 characters.

Sometimes descriptions that are longer than the above limits are more compelling. An ellipsis or "..." will show in the SERP and the information it implies might compel someone to click.
 
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Sorry - busy day! A citation is not a backlink. A citation is your business name, phone number and address. It has less to do with linkjuice to a site than it does a boost to your Google Places. Now that being said Google Places has merged with organic for some terms - that means you need a site that is ranking well AND and Google Places page that is ranking well. If you get a carrier to put your citation up and you make sure it gets indexed you will see your Google Places page jump in ranking in about 1 month. Some carriers don't give proper citations and some do.
 
landers,
as to the "weight" or "link juice" that comes from specifically from yahoo answers. I have no clue.
but keep in mind that obtaining links from the same domain have diminishing value as they acquire more and more.

example: 1 backlink from 10 different sites is far more valueable than 10 backlinks from 1 site (apologies to Alston for my blatant plagiarism on that example).

so based on that, I would assume the first few links would be worthwhile, after that acquiring links would be insignificant.
 
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