Internet Professional Marketers and SEO experts are already aware that good directory submissions are a requirement for any online business owner who is interested in increasing their search engine ranking to create link popularity and increase traffic to websites. Therefore we need to understand what a directory is.

In very basic terms a directory is a list of websites that are listed and broken down into categories and subcategories. So if you want your website to be included into a directory you need to submit your site and have it approved and then you will be listed in that directory. Businesses or individuals that want to know more about any given subject will when accessing that directory be able to find your website.

Some directories will allow you to list your site in the directory for free whereas others may charge a fee to allow you to be listed on their directory. Paying for a directory listing in most cases will guarantee that your site is included in their directory and very quickly usually within 7 days. Directories that you submit to that do not charge fees can take a much longer time to accept your submission. However, prior to listing your URL you do need to have an understanding of the basic rules for directory submissions. Listed below are nine simple things that you need to consider and understand before you submit your site.

• 1. You must ensure that your webpage is fully completed. You should not start to make submissions to any directory until you are sure your site is 100%.
• 2. Make sure that you are not using any popup or popunder windows in your web pages.
• 3. Any advertisements or affiliated links should be kept to the bare minimum as sites with a lot of “fluff” or distractions on them will generally mean that the directory owners will reject the submission.
• 4. Do some research and make sure that you use well-respected and good quality directories. Using relevant directories will improve your rankings in the SERP’s. Search engines give a higher rating to inbound links from sites with relevance just as they do to relevant directories.
• 5. Every directory will have a set of rules and requirements that you must fulfill before you can submit to them. Make sure you know these rules beforehand otherwise you may find that you are wasting a lot of time trying to submit to a directory that you do not fit the requirements of.
• 6. Make sure you have all the required information that the directory will require such as providing your correct email address a relevant description, title, URL and keywords otherwise you may also have your submission rejected.
• 7. Understand the use of keywords fully for optimal recognition within the directory. Most directories will use keywords to enable the individuals that are searching to find your directory. Ensure you put the keywords in to your description and your tile.
• 8. Understand all the categories that you have available to use for placing your URL. This has an impact on giving you a higher search engine ranking as the search engine will consider your entry more relevant as it is in the appropriate category and subcategory. You must also ensure you are choosing the correct subcategories within that category for ease of location and also to ensure that your website is considered as quickly as possible for acceptance by the directory.
• 9. Time is the other important factor that you need to consider, your site may not be accepted immediately, especially if it is not a paid directory listing so don’t just go for one directory, submit to a few different directories to increase your chances of acceptance and also the speed in which your ranking may improve.

Many online businesses enjoy the process of directory submissions and find that they receive great results in a short period of time. Others do find it incredibly time consuming and due to the time involved may not feel there is benefit in the process regardless of the result. If you find that this is not something you feel capable of doing then perhaps you should consider the manual services of a directory submission company to do this for you.

A manual directory submission will provide an effective and very efficient way to increase traffic to your website and increase your business sales. They will not only be able to do the directory submissions for you but they can assist with ideas and processes to increase your internet marketing plan. They of course will also save you a lot of time because they already have a lot of the information on hand that you would need to source if you planned to do the job yourself. They already know many applicable directories for your business and the correct format and information you should use in submissions to get the best results for your business.

Either way, directory submissions will benefit your business, whether you take the time to complete the process correctly yourself or if you enlist the services of a directory submission service.

Bookmark This!

More »

SEO starts with keywords.

Search engine users enter the words into a search engine in order to find the information they want. Do you know which words people type in and how to choose the right words for your website?

The most obvious thing to find out about keywords are how often is it searched for. Which one of the three persons below will get most search traffic, do you think?

These images were found in the WordTracker Keyword Reseach Guide.

It is clear that you need to use the same words that your customers use, rather than the correct industry terms. To find out which words that your customers use, you can use tools as WordTracker or the Google Keywords Tool.

However, that is not all that you will want to learn about the keywords. You also need to find out the competition on that keyword. For some keywords the competition is so strong that it is nearly impossible to achieve some rankings for those words.

And then you have to keep in mind conversions. What do you want your visitors to do? Sign up for something? Buy a product? Just enjoy free information? The different type of visitors use different keywords when finding your site. If your goal is to sell a product, you are not getting much out of visitors that only want to enjoy free information.

The right keywords do not only attract lots of search engine traffic, but also the right traffic.

Bookmark This!

More »

The internet is like a large library, with information on anything that you can think of. It is also called the information superhighway. Most people using the net are on it for the information. Therefore the most important thing on any website is the content!

In general the success of a site will depend on the type and usefulness of the content. You cannot force a visitor to like content that isn’t interesting, useful or unique. The most successful sites are the ones visited by people over and over again. This only happens when the site constantly adds more and new content, whether it are tutorials, newsflashes, sport results or anything interesting.

What about all those online shops? Well, the shops that are only geared towards selling should not expect to be very successful in the search engines and will have to be prepared to use other marketing and advertizing techniques.

The characteristics of good content are:

• It is appealing to the target audience. Know who you are writing for and adjust the content to be attractive for your visitors.
• It is original and says something unique. A lot of information on the Internet is repeated over and over. But you will see that the most successful websites have something new to say.
• It should be interesting and informative. Some information can be found elsewhere on the web, but still people will come to your site because they like your style, your humor. Give it a personal touch.
• It should be easy to understand. The Internet is available to all types of people and your site should be readable by people outside the industry.

Is content writing not your greatest skill? There are various places where you can get a little help.
You can have a look around at the hundreds of article directories where you can get some content for free. All you need to remember is to add the short bio of the original writer.

You can also hire a copywriter, full-time for a large site or freelance for smaller sites. There are also companies providing content writing services. All you need to do is make a specific order with the keywords, length, perhaps a title or a few hints on the topic and they will create it for you.

Good content will bring visitors to your site, but regularly updated content will bring returning visitors to your site. These returning visitors are more likely to explore the rest of your site and find the products or services that you are selling. This means in short: Regularly updated content will bring in more revenues from you site. And that is why content is king.

Bookmark This!

More »

Many web designers are so focused on the design part of building a website, that they will unintentionally affect its search engine rankings. It is a total shame to create an attractive website that does not attract any visitors. There is no point to all that beauty if no one can find it. Here are some ordinary design mistakes that should be kept away from whenever possible.

Image Links
If your navigation menu consists of images to form the buttons instead of text, the search engine bots will be confused. It makes it difficult for search engines to spider and index your site. What if you do not have any other option than image links in the navigation bar? Add ALT text to the image links to give meaning to the image. Make sure that you have text links somewhere else on the page as well. The footer is a nice place to have a few more links.

Frames
When using frames in a site, the problem is that most search engines will only see the frame loader page and ignore the rest of the page within. If you do not have any choice but using frames, offer lead-in pages that are not placed in frames. This means that you can put all of your beautiful frame-based pages in other locations.

Splash Intro Pages
Beautiful intro’s or entry pages, often using flash animation, are impressive to human visitors, even though many of them will ‘skip the intro’ quickly to get to where they want to be. For search engines, however, such a introduction is not impressive at all. The spiders will think that this is the index page and will not find it useful at all. Often, the only text on these intro pages is “skip intro”, which does not say much about the rest of the site.

In order to get the top rankings in the SERPs, your will have to help the search engines a little bit. Their spiders will have to find your site, and be able to navigate the site, and read all of your content, before they can rank it. Some graphic elements will affect the accessibility of your website and are better avoided. Surely it does look nice, but who is there to see it if your site does not attract any visitors?

Bookmark This!

More »

To start with, you need to let search engines come across your website. Search engines use a computer program called Spiders to find new websites. As soon as spiders find your website, they will put it in their databases. However, for brand new websites, it is hard to get found by search engines.

What a lot of webmasters do is to submit their sites to Google and Yahoo by hand, but there really is no need to do that. Here are 5 ideas to get your website indexed by search engines fast:

1. Include a sitemap.xml file in your root directory. This xml file is like a list of the URLs of all pages of your website. This will help the spiders of the search engines with crawling your website. Once you have uploaded it to your root directory, you should set up an account at Google Webmaster Tools. Here you can submit the sitemap.
2. There are a few barricades that prevents spiders from reading the content of your site. Get rid of them. If your website is coded in flash or frames, it is hard for spiders to crawl your website. The spiders prefer languages as HTML or PHP. If spiders cannot crawl your website, they won’t be able to index it either and it will not appear in the SERPs
3. Submit your site to social bookmarking platforms. A good way to get your website detected by search engines is to let them naturally find it. A way to let this happen is to submit your site to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. Spiders generally visit these sites several times per day. If your site is listed on one or more of the bookmarking sites, chances are high that it will be found and indexed.
4. Get a link pointing to your site from a website with high PageRank (PR). Getting a high PR backlink to your site certainly helps successful indexing and it is also possible to get good organic rankings on search engines. Directory submissions are one of my preferred ways to get links pointing to a website. Chose directories with high PR and submit your website to them. Some of the popular directories such as Yahoo need payment before you get included, which could be well worth the money.
5. Write articles and submit to popular article directories. Article marketing is a popular way to get your site noticed by search engines, and it can also attract some traffic to your website. Write an interesting article and include a link in it pointing to your website. Then submit it to popular article directories as WebRaydian and ArticleCube. Spiders are known to visit article directories frequently and once they crawl your article, they will follow the link in it and find your website.

Getting your site crawled by search engine spiders is undeniably a necessity in order to have good rankings in the SERPs. Try some or all of the ideas above and get your site indexed quickly.

Bookmark This!

More »

In order to get the best rankings in the search engines, you need to understand how they work. Regrettably, the answer is complex, and actually secret as well. It all has to do with SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, very few SEO experts, SEO consultants, SEO software and SEO companies can actually give you a perfect SEO explanation, simply because nobody knows the exact truth.

We do know the basics of how search engines work, for more detailed information, you can read on at other blog posts or contact an SEO expert offering SEO services.

Here is what happens in short:
- The search engines visit your website every now and then, and store information on your site in a database.
- Then they compare different factors of your site to the factors of other websites in their database.
- The search engines then rank the websites for each keyword searched, according to different parameters set, with the best website on top.

If you have a website or blog, you probably want to get it to the top search engine rankings, because that will bring in a lot of visitors. With a little bit of money you can hire an SEO consultant to help you with it. Some SEO companies also have simple packages of SEO that you can buy.

You can also do some basic SEO by yourself. This way you can save some money, but you will have to spend quite a lot of time. SEO is a time consuming job, not only applying of SEO techniques is time consuming, it does also take time before you can see results of your efforts. Even an SEO expert will need at least a couple of months to improve rankings of a website.

For DIY-ers, your first step would have to be reading more about the topic – reading about meta tags, keyword research, link building, and organic SEO. Inform yourself on free SEO tools and services and SEO software. This blog is a good place to start with.

Bookmark This!

More »

SEO is the abbreviation of “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer”. It is quite a strange term, since we are not optimizing any search engines. It is a term invented in 1997 to describe the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website’s most relevant keywords, something that had been going on for over a year already.

In the old days, SEO mostly consisted of optimizing the content of a page and the meta tags. Search Engines did not yet use off-page factors in the algorithm of their search results. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, was the first to add off-page factors to the order of rankings by use of counting and evaluating links from one website to another. From then on SEO included link building as well.

Now, SEO is a complex and ongoing process with many factors included. It is becoming more and more difficult for a webmaster to manipulate all these factors. As a result SEO is becoming a separate occupation and SEO expert is often not the designer or manager of the website.

Large companies can hire all the experts in the field, or outsource the SEO work to specific SEO companies, while owners of smaller websites often do basic SEO themselves.

When you have a website, but not the traffic or sales that you expect, it is time to start to read on topics as Search Engine Optimization and Link Development. There are a lot of things that you can do by yourself or outsource. But you do need to take time to understand and learn some SEO techniques before barging on a project. The internet is a good place to learn. Here at this blog, you will be able to read all the basics of SEO, in order to do some yourself and outsource some basic jobs.

Bookmark This!

More »