Outing Discount Health Plans

Posted by Lisa Nichols Feb 17, 2007

I have an unbreakable habit. Because I work in search engine optimization, I will often "view source" when I look at a website, to see if the site is optimized. A quick note on SEO (search engine optimization): SEO includes writing optimized title tags for websites, which you can see when you left-click on a website and then click on View Source. The source shows you the words used to optimize the website. People who enter those keywords in Google should see that website.

Discount health plans are required to state that they are not health insurance. They aren't allowed to imply they are insurance in advertising. But when I looked at several discount health plan websites to see how they used SEO, I found they used insurance-related keywords:

1. The first site I reviewed clearly states "this is not insurance." View source on this discount health plan website and you'll find the word insurance used 27 times on their home page. Keywords included discount health insurance, medical insurance, dental insurance and travel insurance.
2. The second website I reviewed also stated that they "are not health insurance policies." View source on this website to see the word insurance used a whopping 41 times on just the homepage. Keywords included: health insurance quotes, affordable medical insurance and getting health insurance.
3. The third discount health plan website I reviewed was less spammy with their keyword usage, but made good use of SEO. The source for this site revealed that you can "save more" by using this instead of "insurance plans such as ppo, group, major medical or medicare."

If I didn't know about discount health plan scams, I could all too easily confuse these healthcare websites with legitimate insurance companies.

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