Frequently Asked Questions

Dear Customer!

Portal allows many agents from a wide area like state to make their site promotion efforts more cost effective. Web advertisement by virtue of Web design itself is not geographically precise. One can create a Google adWord compain for a phrase California annuities but the problem that most of the visitors that will click on the Ad will be far from the immediate area. Solution: agents from a state or area like South California or Mass Metro West join their efforts and share leads depending on visitor's Postal Code. Clearly in that case less visitors-prospects get lost so the ratio Ad Click/Filled Quote is much higher. Our portal (that gois into production in April) will allow just that for all major lines of business: Personal Auto,Commercial,Home,Life,Disability etc etc.

Is enrollment mandatory? Of course not. It is an optional service provided by our system to our customers.

How search engines rank sites when search is made? By relevance and popularity.

Disclaimer:  true algorithms of the likes of Google etc. are trade secret and changed with time. The factors mentioned here are incomplete and reflect what most publications consider the important factors.

Relevance: Page Title, Meta Tags (not visible), search words in page body and search words in other pages of a site to be ranked.

Popularity: How many other sites link to that site.

Our Content Management System (Site Admin System) allows agents to change Title and Meta Tags to the most appropriate for their business like "health insurance life whole life ..." etc etc.

Clearly you need to market your site via banner exchange or placing links to your site to community portals etc etc. It also increases the number of links pointing to your site.

Local directories on Google and Yahoo are another (for fee) way to market your site locally.

Clearly your site's pages have plenty relevant words like insurance etc etc. We designed content specifically targeting Search Engines.

We also provide links from this site (www.sites4agents.com) to all our existing customers thus providing at least one outside link to their sites.

Our upcoming (April) portal will also have a page with links to all our existing customers whether they enroll to AdWords compaigns or not. That will provide one more outside link into their sites.

Domain Registrars
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A domain name registrar is a company accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to sell Internet domain names.

Web Hosting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that provides individuals, organizations and users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the Web. sites4agents.com is a web hosting company running the specialized software (templates sites for insurance agents/financial advisors).

Domain Pointing.
Suppose you just registered your domain say abc.com
You also purchased hosting services (which if you read the above material is totally separate service).
Question:
How do browsers around US (or the world) know where your site is when users type there "abc.com".

The simplified answer is:
They ask Domain registrar on record for that domain name who your hoster is!
Which makes perfect sense: you can change hosters and people will still be able to reach your site!.
Domain registrar is the focal point of keeping the current info about your domain name (or web address as some call it).

But how your domain registrar knows who is the hoster for your domain name? Simple: you configure your domain name record to POINT to the current web hoster.

If tomorrow you decide that you want to host your web site with another hoster you login into your account with Domain registrar (or ask their CSR) to POINT your domain name to ANOTHER hoster!
Summary - Domain Registrar and Web Hosting are two related but different things and usually two different companies do that especially if we talking about specialized web sites like attorney sites or real estate sites or sites for insurance agents.

Domain transfer
Many domain registrar companies vie for your business i.e. (see Domain Name Registrar) to keep your domain name on their books.
It is a competitive business. ICANN rules to which they should adhere allow for domain name owners (registrants) to switch from one Registrar to another at will.
So domain name transfer is a process when you move your domain name from books of one Registrar to the books of another Registrar.

Question: do you have to transfer domain often?
Answer: Of course not. But you can if you want! That is the point. You do not loose your domain name as a result. It is just you entrust other guy to keep it on their (licensed by ICANN) books.

Question: do we recommend you to do that when you use us as your web hoster?
Answer: Of course not. Sometimes people ask for our recommendation as far as pricing on Domain Registration is concerned so we share our knowledge.
Again we repeat - Pointing domain does NOT mean transfering!!!
It is just a procedure to tell your Domain Registrar who is your web hoster.
Note: sites4agents.com is NOT a Registrar and has NO affiliation or reseller or partnership agreement with any registrar. Those recommendations we give are based on our knowledge at the time of the equest and may not be current!.

Agentquote.com case

Sometimes web hosting companies for a number of reasons decide to become Domain Registrars For a general use web sites it is usually a good value.
Unfortunately for special use ones it is definitely not.
That certainly increases customer loyalty because many professionals like insurance agents are not familiar with web related architectures and technologies.
They believe that by selecting another more competitive web hoster will cause them to loose their domain name.
That prevents them to switching to other MORE COMPETITIVE specialized web hosting sites out of fear of loosing their domain name.
That notion (of not being able to switch) could not be farther from the truth.
By signing the Domain name reseller agreement agentquote.com in its ROLE(!) as Domain Registrar should abide by the rules if they want to stay Domain Registrar.

That means (among many other things) that they have to:

honor Domain POINTING requests to ANY OTHER web hoster
honor Domain TRANSFER requests to ANY OTHER Domain Registrar

It is as simple as that.