Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

Our friends over at SEOmoz posted a great video today on how to get “Awesome Links” on your website. These awesome links are the same type of links that we talk about here for Insurance Agencies.  I think the most “Awesome” links an Insurance Agent can get on their web site are links from their insurance companies they represent. They also mention getting links from Yahoo Local (Create a directory) and from the Librarians’ Internet Index.

Their Video:
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How to Get Awesome Links from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Over the past 4 weeks I have talked about search engines and why it is important to take the time and make sure your insurance website is submitted to all of the major search engines & directories. Google, Yahoo, MSN Live & DMOZ.

Those are not the only search engines out there, there are others; they may not be as popular as Google or Yahoo but they do have web users searching on them. So how important is it to submit your insurance website to the major search engines? Extremely! Take a look at the list below and see how many search engines (This is only a partial list) scan Google, Yahoo or DMOZ for their own search results.

Over the last couple of weeks we have discussed more traditional types of search engines;
Google, Yahoo & MSN Live. This week we are going to talk about a not so traditional buy still very powerful online directory called DMOZ.

DMOZ (Owned by Netscape which is owned by AOL) is more of an online directory than a search engine. DMOZ is indexed by real people and not computer robots. Making the search results much more reliable.

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. Source.

DMOZ has its benefits and it has its disadvantages. Since each site is reviewed by an editor (living, breathing human being) the quality of the search index is better than any other search engine.

The biggest disadvantage that I have noticed is it takes a long time (anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of months) to get a site added to their search index and sometimes your site submissions will be rejected for no apparent reason. I have also seen sites rejected due to poor website layout or invalid categorization.

Nonetheless, DMOZ can be a powerful search tool that separates your insurance agency website from the competition.

Have your insurance web site added to: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html