How to best advertise your Notary Public services online

Hi all, this is Joe Noon, the Founder and Lead Developer here at Notary Depot. A customer service request came in today with some questions on search engines and how to get found, etc. Since I am a full-time web developer and have worked with a large search engine company myself, I gave a slightly lengthy reply. I think the bulk of it would actually benefit anyone, so I am including it here so everyone has access to this info:

Q: I am thinking about upgrading my Notary Depot service but before I do I would like to know how to get my name to search engines.

A: One of the key points to remember is that anything about search engines is in theory, since there are no definite answers, so remember that for the advice I am giving here, and also in case someone ever tries to tell you otherwise—they are lying. And if someone really does know something definite (maybe they work at Google, Yahoo, ASK, etc), what they know may be completely outdated in a matter of weeks because things are changing all the time.

These premises are generally accepted about search engines:

• The more relevant links to a page the higher it will place
• The more that the title, H1, and link tags of the page contain the keywords, the better

Google shows we have roughly 15,000 pages indexed in their search engine. That number is constantly changing as they re-spider our site, which is also another important point—search engine optimization takes time. Its best to make changes and wait a few months to see how they work out before making more changes because you don’t think it’s working. Otherwise, you will never know if what you did would have worked.

Side note: Is your email address visible anywhere on the web? BAD! Notice how your email address is not displayed anywhere on your profile page on our site (but you still receive emails through the form we provide)? GOOD! Thats because we don’t want your email address to get picked up by the thousands of spam bots that go through looking for email addresses. Don’t let your email address get posted anywhere, and only trust sites that hide your email address.

Our site works as follows:

• A Basic Member is allowed to list in 1 city of our directory, meaning one link on our site links to that profile.
• An Intermediate Member is allowed to list in 40 cities of our directory, meaning 40 links on our site link to that profile.
• A Premium Member is allowed to list in 40 cities and 10 counties of our directory. Cities are inherited per county – so for example – if you listed in 10 counties and each county had 20 cities within it, there would actually be 200 inherited city links + the 10 county links + 40 normal city links, for a total of 250 links to your profile.

Each link I mentioned above is on a page that contains your name and phone number. Those numbers also do not include pages from the Forum or Search Query Results, so the numbers would actually be higher in most cases.

So, the general idea is the more exposure you can generate the better. The way I have structured Notary Depot is largely to maximize achieving good exposure in search engines. Therefore, thats why in my honest opinion the Premium membership is a fantastic deal.

Q: Is your site directly involved with the search engines or are they independent? Would I be better of contacting the search engine companies directly?

A: They are definitely independent from us. On our end all we can do is make sure our site is set up as well as possible to get indexed properly by them. As for contacting the search engines companies—that wont work. Their results are based on completely automated algorithms. However most of them also offer Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising which you have probably noticed. For example, if you do a search on Google, the results in the right hand side are all PPC. The normal results are automated (organic). If you choose to try PPC I would recommend Google Adwords (as opposed to the smaller competitors). See how that goes for a few weeks. It should be fairly cheap (10 cents per click hopefully) unless your area is saturated with others that have the same idea.

In the end, the best results will come from doing a combination of as many things as possible (other ideas would be LinkedIn, MySpace, Blogging, etc). Just having PPC OR blogging OR a profile on our site is not going to benefit you too much. But if you put it all together, things start to work.

Joe Noon

Notary Depot

Joe Thanks for the education. One thing for sure -What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow. The internet is like drifting sand.

I get a lot of public notary work from this site. Joe seems to know what he is doing!

Jim, you are 100 percent Right-On. That’s why the opinions on Website Optimization and how Google works, for example, are only “good”, temporarily. I agree with you too, Joanie – I get a lot of hits from this site and offer my personal recommendation to get the Premium Listing now. Joe Noon knows exactly what he’s doing and keeps up on the every-changing web-world.

All the best! Kelly Robertson LSA Coach http://www.LoanSigner101.com

Joe, How often do you think Google rethinks their Search Engine indexes?

You can be assured that minor changes into how pages get ranked occur on a weekly, if not daily basis. Then there are major changes every so often that will have everyone in the search engine optimization business in a frenzy for a few weeks. Its sort of like Windows or Mac OSX. You have a product, say Windows XP. You get weekly “automatic updates” to fix minor bugs. Then you get Windows XP SP2. Then you get more weekly updates, and then you get the next big version, Windows Vista. The same is true for Mac OSX Tiger to Leopard, and most other software related things.

Of course, the key to all of this is to have meaningful, semantic, consistent content. The people that lose out the most in the big index scoring changes are the ones who have purposely built their site around tricks to achieve higher rankings. Those tricks may work in the short term, but in the long haul relevant content is the key.

Joe Noon

Notary Depot

Joe,

Is there any other form of payment for up-grade memberships. I really have a problem submitting my credit card over the internet. I’m just hung up on this.

Patricia,

Unfortunately there are no other methods of payment because of how well our billing system is automated. I can attempt to calm your fears though by telling you how we handle credit cards:

1. You enter your billing information and credit card on a secure (SSL encrypted) page on our site.
2. We perform a preauth for $1 against your credit card (we don’t take the $1, we just ask your credit card if we can) to verify its integrity (over a SSL connection to our gateway).
3. If it is successful, the transaction id is recorded in our database. We never store a single credit card number in our database.
4. When we run the nightly billing batch, we use the previous transaction id to tell our gateway to charge the specified amount.

Web developers are not supposed to store credit card numbers in their databases. In fact its a violation. Unfortunately however, many continue to do this. We don’t. No credit card numbers are in our database. We only store the last 4 digits so we can show you which credit card you are being billed on.

I’m not sure if this will change your mind about using your credit card on Notary Depot, but I think its good for everyone to know exactly what our procedure here is.

Joe Noon

Notary Depot

Joe. Thank You for that last note. With the times today some of us enter our personal information without understanding the process of where and what information is being placed. Thank you because it is a very important topic that I am glad you discussed

Thank you Joe, I just have to try and overcome this fear. With so much identy theft, it’s real hard for me to do this. What about a pre-paid Visa Card? Could you use this as a form of payment?

Patricia,

I’ve never used a pre-paid visa, but my guess is it would work.

You can also check out LifeLock

Joe Noon

Notary Depot

PAY PAL is a great service and this is how my monthly dues are paid.