March 19, 2009
The fascinating thing about search engine optimisation melbourne is how your current web site, or your current page is optimized. Now this doesn’t mean inputting keywords all over the place on the page. Normally, you are looking at about 5% or so for the keyword appearance but it is near to impossible to write an article or write content in the page to make sure it comes up to that sort of percentage.
Here’s some good advice when choosing a web developer:
1. Make sure your page’s HTML is properly marked up - When you get some young freelance web developer who has been out of the university for 5 minutes and is cheap, you are probably doing yourself a huge kick in the butt. Yeah you’ll end up with a cheap option but the damage done is huge. Good web developers will know the difference between proper HTML and incorrect HTML. Ask the question … Can you do hand coding? Yes or no.
2. Does your developer know the difference between a div id and a div class? Yes or No? The answer is pretty simple. div ids are used as a layout feature, meaning you can only reference back to it using Javascript once. The class is a style feature, you can assign a class to any element on the page.
February 8, 2009
I recently was asked by an author to remove a free content
article from a client web site where we had posted it (with
several others from different authors) to increase topical
relevancy at a site that fit the article perfectly.
This article was submitted to free web content list archives
which I’d found online. A search turned up dozens of
additional uses across the web. I began to believe that this
author simply didn’t like the site that used the article and
was seeking removal to avoid competition. We took it down to
avoid an unnecessary battle over something we didn’t wish to
fight about.
The site we used it on did compete with this person, but the
client site has more to lose than the author, because readers
could click through to the author site from the resource box
link and gain the customer instead of the client. Having YOUR
article on competitors sites is an incredible marketing coup!
You should be glad anytime this happens as long as they follow
your use restrictions and provide live links from the resource
box at the end of your articles. The client wisely saw topical
web content for their site more valuable than the concern of
that external link to the author/competitor.
It does immeasurable good for your link popularity as well
since that link comes from a relevant and on-topic site,
rather than from a useless links directory. Your articles
serve as 500 to 1200 word advertisements for your business and
if it appears on competitor sites, it is as if you have been
able to sneak in the back door and steal customers from the
competing site via your article. Would you rather appear in a
random list of links, or have 1000 words to convince people to
buy your products or services?
All of this just baffles me as a content distributor. All of
those authors that requested removal would gain a valuable
one-way inbound link to their websites from topical and
relevant content that increases their link popularity and
their visibility.
Why on earth would they want those articles, that notoriety,
that credibility and the high quality links removed? When
there is no copyright issue present, you gain far more from
use of your article than you lose by having an article on
sites you don’t like.
I’ve got articles lose in the world that I’m not proud of,
simply because I’ve become a better writer since I distributed
them originally. Several are outdated and recommend things
that are no longer valid or, in some cases, not at all useful
for current standards in search engine ranking - but that is
because the search engine algorithms have changed and best
practices have changed.
That is why I now date my article copyright to clearly show
the date associated with the article. But I would NEVER
request removal of my articles from sites that have old
articles posted. They will STILL be more relevant and valuable
to me than any cluttered, off-topic reciprocal links
directory, because they are a link within relevant text that
gain link popularity and sometimes lead to new clients and
further visibility.
Removal of your articles from compeitor sites would be silly
in most cases and will reduce your visibility and your link
popularity. Be the Fox in the Competitor Hen House instead
of Chicken Little in fear of the article marketing sky falling.
Copyright © August 10, 2005
Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com
Free Web Content Distribution for Article Marketers and
Provides content aggregation, press release optimization
Custom web content for Search Engine Positioning
http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm
Learn at http://WebSite101.com Ecommerce Tutorial
January 13, 2009
Welcome to part five in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of content optimization. In part five we will cover your website’s internal linking structure and the role that it plays in ranking highly, and in ranking for multiple phrases.
While this aspect is not necessarily the single most important of the ten steps it can be the difference between first page and second page rankings, and can make all the difference in the world when you are trying to rank your website for multiple phrases.
Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.
The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:
Step Five - Internal Linking
With all the talk out there about linking, one might be under the impression that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links certainly play an important role (as will be discussed in part eight of this series) these are certainly not the only important links.
When you’re about to launch into your link work why not stop and consider the ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first. That would be, the ones right there on your own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal.
The internal linking structure can:
Insure that your website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by the search engines
Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
Increase the PageRank of an internal page
Here is how the internal linking structure can affect these areas and how to maximize the effectiveness of the internal linking on your own website.
Getting Your Website Spidered
Insuring that every page of your website gets found by the search engine spiders is probably the simplest thing you can do for your rankings. Not only will this increase the number of pages that a search engine credits your site with, but it also increases the number of phrases that your website has the potential to rank for.
I have seen websites that, once the search engines find all of their pages, find that they are ranking on the first page and seeing traffic from phrases they never thought to even research or target.
This may not necessarily be the case for you however having a larger site with more pages related to your content will boost the value of your site overall. You are offering this content to your visitors, so why hide it from the search engines.
Pages can be hidden from search engines if the linking is done in a way that they cannot read. This is the case in many navigation scripts. If your site uses a script-based navigation system then you will want to consider the implementation of one of the internal linking structures noted further in the article.
Additionally, image-based navigation is spiderable however the search engines can’t see what an image is and thus, cannot assign any relevancy from an image to the page it links to other than assigning it a place in your website hierarchy.
Building The Relevancy Of A Page To A Keyword Phrase
Anyone who wants to get their website into the top positions on the search engines for multiple phrases must start out with a clearly defined objective, including which pages should rank for which phrases. Generally speaking it will be your homepage that you will use to target your most competitive phrase and move on to targeting less competitive phrases on your internal pages.
To help build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase you will want to use the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the links to that page. Let’s assume that you have a website hosting company. Rather than linking to your homepage with the anchor text “home” link to it with the text “web hosting main”. This will attach the words “web” and “hosting” and “main” to your homepage. You can obviously leave the word “main” out if desirable however in many cases it does work for the visitor (you know, those people you’re actually building the site for).
This doesn’t stop at the homepage. If you are linking to internal pages either through your navigation, footers, or inline text links - try to use the phrases that you would want to target on those pages as the linking text. For example, if that hosting company offered and wanted to target “dedicated hosting”, rather than leaving the link at solely the beautiful graphic in the middle of the homepage they would want to include a text link with the anchor text “dedicated hosting” and link to this internal page. This will tie the keywords “dedicated hosting” to the page.
In a field as competitive as hosting this alone won’t launch the site to the top ten however it’ll give it a boost and in SEO, especially for competitive phrases, every advantage you can give your site counts.
Increasing The PageRank Of Internal Pages
While we will be discussing PageRank (a Google-based term) here the same rules generally apply for the other engines. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage, the higher the value (or PageRank) the page is assigned. Basically, if I have a page linked to from my homepage it will be given more weight that a page that is four or five levels deep in my site.
This does not mean that you should link to all of your pages from your homepage. Not only does this diffuse the weight of each individual link but it will look incredibly unattractive if your site is significantly large.
Figure out what you main phrases are and which pages will be used to rank for them and be sure to include text links to these internal pages on your homepage. It’s important to pick solid pages to target keyword phrases on as you don’t want human visitors going to your “terms and conditions” page before they’ve even seen the products.
If that hosting company noted above has a PageRank 6 homepage, the pages linked from its homepage will generally be a PageRank 5 (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 depending on the weight of the 6 for the homepage). Regardless, it will be significantly higher that if that page was linked to from a PageRank 3 internal page.
How To Improve Your Internal Linking Structure
There are many methods you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The three main ones are:
- Text link navigation
- Footers
- Inline text links
Text Link Navigation
Most websites include some form of navigation on the left hand side. This makes it one of the first things read by a search engine spider (read “Table Structures For Top Search Engine Positioning” by Mary Davies (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/se-friendly-design/table-structure.htm) for methods on getting your content read before your left hand navigation). If it is one of the first things the search engine spiders sees when it goes through your site it will have a strong weight added to it so it must be optimized with care.
If you are using text link navigation be sure to include the targeted keywords in the links. Thankfully this cannot be taken as meaning “cram your keywords into each and every link” because this is your navigation and that would look ridiculous. I’ve seen sites that try to get the main phrase in virtually every link. Not only does this look horrible but it may get your site penalized for spam (especially if the links are one after another).
You don’t have to get your keywords in every link but if workable, every second or third link works well. Also consider what you are targeting on internal pages. If you homepage target is “web hosting” and you’ve linked to you homepage in the navigation with “web hosting main” which is followed by your contact page so you’ve used “contact us”, it would be a good idea to use the anchor text “dedicated hosting” for the third link. It reinforces the “hosting” relevancy and also attaches relevancy to the dedicated hosting page of the site to the phrase “dedicated hosting” in the anchor text.
Footers
Footers are the often overused and abused area of websites. While they are useful for getting spiders through your site and the other points noted above, they should not be used as spam tools. I’ve seen in my travels, footers that are longer than the content areas of pages from websites linking to every single page in their site from them. Not only does this look bad but it reduces that value of each individual link (which then become 1 out of 200 links rather than 1 out of 10 or 20).
Keep your footers clean, use the anchor text well, and link to the key internal pages of your website and you will have a well optimized footer. You will also want to include in your footer a link to a sitemap. On this sitemap, link to every page in your site. Here is where you can simply insure that every page gets found. Well worded anchor text is a good rule on your sitemap as well. You may also want to consider a limited description of the page on your sitemap. This will give you added verbiage to solidify the relevancy of the sitemap page to the page you are linking to.
Internal Text Links
Internal text links are links placed within the content of your work. They were covered in last week’s article on content optimization, which gives me a great opportunity to use one as an example. (in the HTML version the text “content optimization” was used as an example inline link to http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/optimization.htm).
While debatable, inline text links do appear to be given extra weight as their very nature implies that the link is entirely relevant to the content of the site.
You can read more on this in last week’s article.
Final Notes
As noted above, simply changing your internal navigation will not launch your site to the top of the rankings however it’s important to use each and every advantage available to create a solid top ten ranking for your site that will hold it’s position.
They will get your pages doing better, they will help get your entire site spidered, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.
Even if that’s all they do, aren’t they worth taking the time to do right?
Next Week
Next week in part six of our “Ten Steps To an Optimized Website” series we will be covering the importance of human testing. Having a well-ranked website will mean nothing if people can’t find their way through it or if it is visually unappealing.
About The Author
Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.
info@beanstalk-inc.com
November 28, 2008
As a business owner, your first thought is to create the relevant marketing material to market your products in the industry that you are in. The only problem here is how to do it cheaply and with better results. Traditionally, with print media, you will not be able to measure the performance of the advertisement. Brand management with print media has always been difficult to measure. But with the internet, the response is immediate and the results are clear. It is either bringing in traffic or it is not. Nothing else matters.
When search engines came about and were indexing web pages like crazy, the logic was easy for webmasters to optimize their pages so that it came up first in the search engine. Then came good old google and changed the way things were run. It no only did not work if you stuff keywords in your page, but it actually penalized your page so that it did not come up even in the search results. That is very very very scary for a business owner!
The art of search engine optimization melbourne is a science and an art itself. It takes a lot of work to get your site noticed. But once you are there, you can rest assured that little maintenance is required to get your site there staying there.
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October 11, 2008
My introduction to search engine optimization started in London a few years back and, after experimenting with Web Position Gold, I honed these skills to attain very good results in promoting clients’ websites. Later, I discovered that link building was a necessary but highly tedious monthly process. This I still do to an extent, but today I am increasingly drawn to article writing as the medium for promoting both ourselves and our clients in the world of Web 2.0.
As a former sub-editor for a number of publications in London, it is quite a stimulating pastime to research subjects that interest me. It is also as a valuable means of gaining exposure for our sites. So this year I will be writing for ourselves and our clients through submitting relevant articles to high PR websites; each will then provide us with valuable one-way links.
Also, these articles will appear in the WordPress section of our website so as to syndicate the information further via our RSS feed. As an aside, Google’s Adsense has been added to WordPress and I am keenly aware that the use of high-paying keywords could see some additional rewards for our efforts ― ’search engine optimization’ ranking amongst the top performers.
According to www.weird-websites.com the top ten keywords are: 1) 213,259 paris hilton 2) 155,497 google 3) 124,016 yahoo 4) 121,086 ebay 5) 96,264 eminem 6) 96,262 britney spears 7) 94,014 mapquest 
93,708 tsunami 9) 90,841 girls 10) 90,334 89.com
So, submissions have almost been suspended to the free directories and our monthly SEO programme is now much more focused on article writing. They are not intended to only have SEO value; they are being written to provide readers with relevant and interesting content that may not be commonly available elsewhere.
There seem to be a plethora of e-zines out there that accept articles from writers, but I am concentrating on making submissions to the following list that have PR rankings of 7 thru 5: http://www.ezinearticles.com - PR7 http://www.lilengine.com - PR7 http://www.webpronews.com - PR7 http://www.articlecentral.com - PR7 http://www.web-source.net - PR7 http://www.articlecity.com - PR6 http://www.goarticles.com - PR6 http://www.businessknowhow.com - pr6 http://www.articleCity.com - PR6 http://www.buzzle.com - PR6 http://www.web-source.net -PR6 http://www.xongoo.com - PR6 http://www.zinos.com -PR6 http://www.constant-content.com - PR5 http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5staraffiliateprograms.com - PR5 http://www.submityourarticle.com - PR5 http://www.isnare.com PR5 http://www.authorconnection.com - PR5 http://www.articlealley.com - PR5 http://www.articlesfactory.com - PR5 http://www.articlefinders.com - PR5 http://www.ideamarketers.com - PR5
October 8, 2008
Rankings, Rankings, Rankings!
How do you get your website ranked well by the search engines? Well, it isn’t as hard as you think, but it may not be as simple either. It takes patience and an ongoing commitment to making search-engine ranking a long-term investment in your website. You will need to give it time and energy - it isn’t a quick fix.
One caveat before I dive into this: If you are a company that is working on attracting local customers, there are many other incredibly effective offline marketing tools to DRIVE people to your website. So, what if you really want to work on search-engine ranking for your site?
Keep these points in mind:
1. Search engines often change their ranking formula.
2. Each search engine has its own algorithm (formula) to determine site ranking.
3. META tag keywords are not a magic bullet to improve your ranking.
4. Search engines can take many months to index new information, so patience…patience.
5. Be cautious with graphics-rich websites if search-engine ranking is important.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Let’s start at the beginning. When you type a query into a search engine, what happens? Some people think that each time a search is entered into a search engine like Google, that the program hunts through the entire Internet to produce the answer. This is NOT what occurs.
Let’s say I type in the words “dog obedience” into Yahoo. Yahoo then takes these keywords and searches through its own unique database of indexed websites to find matches. To add to and update their databases, search engines have programs called “spiders” that crawl through pages on the Internet looking for pages and sites to index. However, they do NOT locate sites on their own. They find sites if someone has purposely entered a website into a search engine’s “Add URL” form. They are also able to find a website if another site in its database has links to it.
When a search engine finds a site, it considers the text on the website to be the number one thing to extract. It places data its database categorized by information it perceives as being important. So, if you have a company that has free articles teaching people how to train their dogs, but you don’t have the word “obedience” listed anywhere, your site may not be listed in the above sample search.
So then, after all of this - how do you get a high-ranking search engine?
Your Keys to Search Engine Ranking
You must think of search engine optimization as a long-term investment in your website. It is an ongoing marketing effort that takes persistence. As you begin to implement optimization techniques, remember it can take several months before you see the results, so be patient. Here are some tips to help you improve your website rankings in the future.
1. Plan Your Content: Before you develop your site, make a list of all the possible search words and phrases you think a potential customer would use to locate your website. A research tool such as WordTracker can help you in this process. Write compelling, professional marketing content for your site that is rich with these search words and phrases, especially on your home page. Make pages about 250 words. Tip: Hire a professional web copywriter to write your site content.
2. Meta Keyword Tags Are Overrated: Contrary to what many people believe, your META keyword tags in your HTML code have very little bearing on the words a search engine uses to reference your site. What does this mean for your site? Make sure your web pages have easy-to-understand paragraphs that describe your site and contain many of your important search words. These search words should match your META keyword tags, otherwise, the spiders tend to disregard the keyword tags.
3. Title Tags Are Vital: Most search engines give a lot of weight to your title tags. These are also the phrases that appear at the top of each web page. So, take the time to create juicy and precise title tags. Use words and phrases that people would be likely to use in their search for your business. Reflect what is actually on the specific web page.
4. Meta Description Tags: This is the area where you write HTML content to describe each of your web pages. Although it is not a major factor in search engine ranking, it IS what is displayed in the search results. People searching will use this description to make a decision to visit your site or not. Use this area for marketing purposes to entice people to click on your link.
5. Design a Site That Search Engines Like: Websites that have graphic Splash pages or are designed in Flash are not as friendly to SE indexing. For the most part, search engines do not index graphics. They read text (but not graphic text). Use small amounts of Flash animation and graphics in appropriate places, along with great HTML content. Along with these graphics, use text for your image ALT tags. If you have a graphic-based navigation system, make sure you have a site map that the spider can use to find all of your site page links.
6. Create a Compelling Site: If you haven’t created a website with gripping content that speaks to your visitors in plain, easy-to-understand language, you won’t get good long-term search-engine visibility. Nor, will visitors ever want to come back. Make your site so good that people will want to link to it. They will want to provide their viewers with your copious amounts of useful information. You can also go to sites that offer complimentary services or products and e-mail their webmaster to ask them to add a link to your site. This will enhance your link popularity, something search engines tend to consider important.
7. Submit your URL to the Directories: Read each search engine’s FAQs and follow it exactly. Mistakes in the submission process can make things extremely difficult to change down the road. Keep your website description short and sweet. Be sure to include keywords, but don’t use a lot of sales jargon.
8. Balance Your Online Marketing Approach: You will get the best results if you create a website that is content rich, popular with viewers, has a credible reputation, and is programmed using a smart approach to Meta tags.
Search engine spiders can be extremely slow to index new information, so be patient! It may take months to see your changes affect your search engine ranking. Remember, a website is a dynamic marketing tool that you are building over time. Treat it well, give it a little love and attention, and your long-term rewards will be well worth your efforts!
Wendy Maynard, your friendly Marketing Maven, publishes REMARKABLE MARKETING, a free weekly ezine for entrepreneurs, business owners, and freelancers. If you’re ready to skyrocket your sales, easily attract customers, and make more money, sign up for her FREE EZINE and report now at http://www.gomarketingmaven.com
October 7, 2008
If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add the site to its index? Do you know that it doesn’t see the beautiful graphics or the fancy Web design? Do you know that it only sees the source code, or the “skeleton” of your Web site?
Do you realize that knowing this little tidbit of information and doing something about it can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings and, ultimately, the success of your online business?
One very important thing that you need to remember is: the search engines like simplicity. The simpler your Web site is, the easier it is for the engine to determine what your Web site is about. And, if the search engine can determine exactly what your Web site is about, you have a better chance at top rankings under the keyword phrases that are important for your online business.
Let’s look at this concept in action with a page I recently created for one of my online businesses: Search Engine Workshops.
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/search-engine-seminars.html
As you can see, it’s a very plain, simple page that was not created to be the “main” or “home” page of a Web site. Rather, it was created to pull in traffic through the keyword phrase, “search engine seminars.”
What I really want you to see is the source code of the page. So, when viewing the page, click on View on the top menu bar, then Source or Source Code.
The most important part of a Web page is what appears at the very top of the page. Why? Because a search engine starts at the top of the page and begins moving down as it indexes.
So, what appears in the section of your Web page is very important, because the section is at the top of the page.
Let’s look at the section of the source code:
Search Engine Seminars–your path to success on the Web!
There are only three tags in the section of this Web page: the title tag, the keyword META tag, and the description META tag. Because the title tag is in the section, and because of the importance that most engines place on the tag, it is considered one of the most important tags on your page, so it should always be the first tag in the section.
Notice that in the title and keyword META tag, the important keyword phrase (search engine seminars) appears as the first words in the tag. In the description META tag, the keyword phrase is still toward the beginning of the tag, as opposed to the end.
In other words, where you place your keyword phrase in the tags and content of your page is important. If you place your keyword phrase toward the beginning of all of your important tags and toward the beginning of the contents, you’re “proving” to the engines that the page is really about that particular topic.
I’ve mentioned one reason why the title tag is important, but there’s another reason too. The title tag is important because it almost always appears as the title of the site in the search engine results. Your description META tag may appear in the search engine results as well and is considered important by the some of the engines. So, when you create your title and description tags, remember two things: put your keyword phrase toward the beginning of the tags, and make the tags captivating and designed to pull in traffic.
Think of it this way. If your site is #10 in the search engine rankings, but if the sites above yours haven’t gone to the trouble to create appealing titles and descriptions, a search engine user may skip over those sites to visit yours.
Now, let’s go back to the source code. Look for this tag, which isn’t far from the tag:
This is the image, or graphics, tag for the Search Engine Workshops banner that appears at the very top of the page. Notice that the engine doesn’t “see” the graphic itself. It sees the name of the graphic (banner3.jpg), and it sees the ALT text that describes the image. It sees the width and height of the graphic. But, it doesn’t see the graphic itself. So, the engine doesn’t know that the graphic says, “Search Engine Workshops.”
Next, look for this tag, which directly follows the image tag:
Search Engine Seminars
An tag is a heading tag, and heading tags are very important to a Web page. Try to put a heading tag at the very top of your page, if at all possible, and use your important keyword phrase in that heading tag. When you look back at my actual Web page, do you see the words “Search Engine Seminars” right under the graphic? That’s the heading tag.
Now, look for this tag in the source code:
Is your Web site achieving the success that. . .
This is where the contents of the Web page begin. Look on the actual Web page and find the text: “Is your Web site achieving the success that . . .” Notice that the keyword phrase (search engine seminars) appears in the first paragraph.
In other words, with all of these tags and the placement of our keyword phrase in the page’s contents, we’re proving to the engines that the page is really about “search engine seminars.”
So, let’s visit your site on the Web. View the source code. What’s in the section? Are your title and description tags using the keyword phrase that’s important for that particular page? Are your title and description tags captivating and designed to pull in traffic? Each page of your site should have different title and description tags, and those tags should be based on the focus of that page - what that page is really about: in other words, its keyword phrase.
How many graphics do you have before the actual contents of your site? If you have a lot of graphics, navigation bars, or buttons before the contents of your page, the engine has to sort through all of that source code before it gets to the actual keyword- containing content.
Does your page contain lengthy JavaScript or other code that pushes the important contents toward the bottom of the page? If so, it could be hindering your chances at top rankings.
Are you using a heading tag that contains your important keyword phrase toward the very top of your page? Is your keyword phrase used in the first paragraph of the page? Is it used in several places throughout the page?
Look back at my page. Notice that the keyword phrase, search engine seminars, is used as link text to describe several links. Are you using your keyword phrase to describe links that are leaving the page? If not, try to do so.
Study your own site carefully, and apply these guidelines to your pages.
Doing whatever you can to push your important keyword phrase toward the top of the page and toward the beginning of your tags is the first step toward having a successful Web site that’s ranked in the top of the search engine rankings.
About The Author
Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists, has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing (http://www.academywebspecialists.com) training programs. Visit the Academy’s training site to learn more (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). She also teaches 3-day hands-on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).
Copyright 2002 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.
RobinN@acws.com
September 19, 2008
If you’re a webmaster, you’ve probably spent almost as much time going after link exchanges as actually building your website. Gaining in-bound links, especially from websites with a higher PageRank than your own, can increase your own PageRank on Google, and help your site attain a better overall ranking in Google search results. Proposing link exchanges with other sites that have similar content to your own is a good idea, but the process can be terribly time consuming. So what else can you do?
Most webmasters tend to underestimate the usefulness of online directories in propagating links to their website. No, I am not talking about FFA pages or the thousands of small directories only the website owners and perhaps two other people know about. I am talking about the big directories, such as The Open Directory Project (ODP or DMOZ), Yahoo, Zeal, and even Buzzle.
Getting a listing, or multiple listings, in these directories can bring direct traffic to your website. But perhaps most importantly, these directories act as a propagation source for other sites that are looking to place relevant links on their site. For example, someone who has website about tropical plants may want to place a variety of links to other sites with the same topic. Chances are good they will go to one (or more) of these directories, pick out some links, and place them on their links page. Now, if your website has something to do with tropical plants, and your site was listed in the directory and category they took links from, you might have received a free link from this other website without ever having asked for it. You would probably be surprised just how many new sites fill their fledgling link pages with websites listed on Yahoo, ODP, and other directories.
Furthermore, various popular search engines directly use one or more of these directories to populate their search results. For instance, Google is known to use, and look favorably upon, sites listed in ODP. In fact, Google’s so-called directory is populated almost entirely with ODP categories and websites. And because ODP data can be freely placed on any website or within any search engine, literally thousands of websites and search engines use their data. Free links galore!
There really aren’t many search engines that directly use the Yahoo directory, but that doesn’t devalue a Yahoo listing. A website listed in the Yahoo directory will benefit due to direct traffic from that listing, as well as the possibility of better placement in the Yahoo search results. Yahoo is the most used search engine behind Google, so good placement within their results is important. And as mentioned previously, many websites will “borrow” links from the Yahoo directory to place on their own site. There is no doubt that getting listed in the ODP and on Yahoo will lead to more links beyond the one or two you get in the directories.
Smaller directories, like Zeal and Buzzle are also worth submitting to for the same reasons. Zeal is a particularly good deal because site submission is free (once you are a Zeal member) and the links in the directory are used throughout the Looksmart Network, which includes the sites Looksmart.com, Wisenut.com, Findarticles.com, and more. Buzzle is an informative directory that contains useful articles as well as links. Getting listed within the Buzzle directory costs $59 (nonprofit sites are free), but it may be worth it considering you are getting a link from a good site with decent exposure.
There are many other high-quality directories you may want to consider. Good places to look for directories are, ironically, in the ODP and on Yahoo under the category Directories or Search Engines. Yahoo is especially helpful in that it lists the most popular directories first.
Bradley James is the Chief Editor at GoogleAdvisor.org. He has a computer science degree (BS) from Truman state University, and is currently working on his MS degree at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He is especially interested in search algorithms used by such search engines as Google and Yahoo.
