On Jun 10th and 11th, we are scheduled to speak at the Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services Conference in San Francisco, CA. 

Our session will be focused on best practices and tips to increase the search engine performance of your financial advisor website.

Visit The Jab Web Solutions Inc. Company Site

Continuing our quest to help Financial Advisors improve the performance of their websites in search engines, we recommend that you take a few minutes and visit the Open Directory Project at www.DMOZ.org

Since many leading search Directories and Meta Search Engines draw their results in part from DMOZ.org, submitting your site is certainly worth your time. 

We suggest that Financial Planners and Independent Investment Advisors submit to the following section:

/Business/Financial_Services/Financial_Planning/

You can get to the sign-up page for this section directly through this link:

http://www.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/add.cgi?where=Business/Financial_Services/Financial_Planning

Article by Jab Web Solutions Inc.
www.jabwebsolutions.com

This Month's Quick Tip: You Own Your Domain Name, Right?

Did you know that you may not actually be the registered owner of your domain name?  You may be the owner of Smith Wealth Management, and your website address may be smithwealthmanagement.com, but the registered owner of the domain may be your web designer, your hosting company or the domain name registrar themselves.  Please take this simple, but important step to ensure you own your domain name.

Go to NetworkSolutions.com and click their "Who Is" link at the bottom of the page.

Punch in your domain name and check the registration information.  Your company should be listed as the Registrant.  Whoever is listed as the registrant has ownership of the domain name.  Most Domain Name Registrars and Web Hosting companies will list their customers as the registrant, but in many cases, they may be listing themselves as the registrant, leaving you at their mercy if you were to ever try to move to a new host or another registrar.

Welcome to the January 2008 issue of our newsletter.

This issue includes updates on JAB Web Solutions services, showcases recent client work and includes details about our upcoming speaking engagement.

Welcome to the December 2007 issue of our newsletter.

This issue includes updates on JAB Web Solutions services, showcases recent client work, our Monthly "Quick Tip" and a new article on making your advisor website stand out.  We're also introducing a new section of our newsletter called "Industry Insiders on the Hot Seat".

On February 26 and 27th, we attended the Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services Regional Conference in Washington D.C.   At the event we were given the opportunity to run a breakout session on "Driving Traffic to your Website."

We'd like to thank the folks at Fidelity for the chance to speak to their Advisors and for the first class setup during the two day event.

We met a lot of great people and continued to learn as much as possible about the RIA business in an effort to better meet our clients' ever changing needs. 

www.jabwebsolutions.com

Industry insiders in The Hot Seat:  With Craig Dinan From ContentFast

Focus on the Big Three Search Engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN (live.com) as they comprise roughly 90% of all searches in the U.S.

Don't be fooled by offers to "submit your website to the 1000 top search engines" as there are not 1000 top search engines.  Many of the smaller search engines and directories actually draw their search results from the Big 3.

*Source: Nielsen Online reports December 2007 data for the Top U.S.  Search Providers. Top search providers, ranked by total searches. Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider.

SEO Basics:  Moving up the Search Engine Ranks

One of the best ways to promote your business is to get your website into the top ten on the search engines for your keyword phrases. The question is, how do you do that? It isn’t as difficult as you might think, it simply requires a few techniques to make your pages more search engine friendly. Here, we will explain exactly how you can get your website into the top website results, without having to be too terribly technical.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the term used to cover pretty much all techniques related to getting your website listed in the top search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most sought after listings, but the competition can be fierce. That’s where SEO comes in, giving you a better chance at getting into the top ten listings for your keyword phrase.

Entire books (e-books, that is) have been written about search engine optimization, so we won’t cover everything here. Rather, we’ll take a look at some of the easier techniques and must-dos so you can get started and get ranked in Google quickly. With Google and Yahoo cornering up to 80% of search engine traffic, you really want to be listed high with these two. The remaining search engines will follow almost immediately, although it can actually be easier to get listed on smaller search engines, in some cases.

Content is King

If you spend any time online at all, you will hear the above phrase over and over. It is really true. By simply putting up content on a regular basis on your website, you will automatically draw search engine spiders. This is why blogs are so popular in search engines, they are constantly updating content.

Really, content can be anything. You can use photos, videos, articles, interviews, product reviews, etc. to add value to your site. By including your keywords and keyword phrases in the content (or description in the case of photos and videos), you help the search engine spiders file it under the correct listings.

Even if you have a business website, you can make it much more attractive to search engines and human visitors alike by giving valuable information. For example, if you are selling lawnmowers, you might try adding some articles to your site offering grass cutting techniques, lawn mower care tips, etc. The more content you have, the more the spiders will visit you.

The key is to update your pages on a regular basis. You can continue to add new photos or articles to the site, have a daily tip or quote, or have a news section that you report in frequently. Another good way to draw the spiders is to set up a blog on your website and post daily blog articles. This is ideal because blog posts are usually fairly short, 150-300 words, so they are easy to write and publish on a daily basis.

Make Lots of Friends

The more links you have coming in to your site, the better the search engines like you. The best links are non-reciprocal, that is, when someone else links to you and doesn’t require a link back. However, you will probably find it easier to get reciprocal links, especially early in the game.

There are many ways to get links, but here we will just focus on just a handful very effective methods.

First, writing great content and having good, top quality information on your website will bring in links automatically as people discover the website and want to share it with others. Each one of these links will help your website get noticed by the big boys like Google and Yahoo.

Article marketing has been around for a while, but it is still very useful for getting links. What you do is rewrite an article that is already on your website, or write a new one, if you are so inclined, and submit it to a free article directory. You will be allowed to add a bio box with your author info and a link back to your website. Every article directory that you submit to is a backlink. Then, when webmasters start to pick up your article to publish on their sites, you will find that your number of backlinks goes up drastically. All this draws in the search engine spiders, too.

The last method of getting links is to simply ask. Find websites that cover similar material to yours and write a polite email asking if they would mind linking to you. The best way to make sure that they do link to you is to add a reciprocal link on your own page and include the URL in your email, letting them know that you are interested in an exchange. It can’t hurt to ask, can it? And if they say no, then just take down your link to them.

What to Avoid

There are certain “black hat” techniques that you are likely to see around if you are looking for methods to get your website onto Google. Be aware that these are techniques that may work for a short amount of time, but will get you banned from the major search engines if you are caught. And they almost always catch black hatters. Here are a few of the worst mistakes you can make when trying to stay on the good side of the search engines.

Keyword stuffing: This is when you absolutely cram your articles or webpage with your chosen keyword phrase. It will get you banned from Google and most other search engines as well. The ideal web page will have about 1-3% keyword density, meaning the keyword phrase repeats 1-3 times every hundred words. Much more than that and you are risking losing your search engine ranking completely.

Invisible text: You may read about this now outdated technique on some older SEO websites. It is completely taboo and the search engines are on the look out for this type of thing. Invisible text is your keyword repeated over and over,  in the same color as your  background so it doesn’t appear to visitors, only to search engine spiders. While it was an effective black hat technique in its time, that ship has long since sailed.

Over-promoting yourself: When you use Web 2.0 sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg to promote your own website, beware. Although a stumble here and there probably won’t hurt anything, if you get caught promoting your own stuff, you can be in big trouble! This can mean that your account with that particular website gets closed or you will have your own sites banned. Not the best promotion method, so try to get friends and family to promote the business site.

Over-Submitting your website: There is no need to submit your site to the search engines more than once. Some people swear by monthly re-submitting, but most experts agree that it not only doesn’t help, but may even hinder you. Instead, stick to natural techniques and watch your ratings stay nice and stable.

Link farms and directories: These are webpages that list thousands of websites for a small fee. Not worth it. The search engines don’t like these sites, because they are cheating. The same goes for paying for a high PR link, if you get caught, you could be penalized or even banned.

Getting your website noticed by Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines isn’t rocket science, although there are people who would have you think that. By providing quality content on your website and getting some links back, you are basically guaranteed that you will appear shortly. If you have used your keywords and phrases correctly throughout the website, you may even see yourself in the top ten for search results on your key phrase.

While you can always tweak and improve your site, why not try the easier methods first and see how far you get? With the basics outlined in this article, you should be getting search spiders in a few days, sniffing around your site.