Posts Tagged ‘Directory Submission’

How to increase your website traffic using blog sites

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Writing blogs is an excellent way of increasing traffic to your anchor website because blogs are a medium to become visible and popular through active interaction with other web users. Blogs become the link between the main website and potential customers. They start collecting valuable backlinks and direct them to your website.

Starting a blog is quite easy; blog sites like Word Press and Blogger.com offer ready-to-use formats. You can customize a blog page by selecting from different template looks, lay-out of the page, colour etc. You can start posting immediately, but there are a few areas to pay attention to for optimizing the blogs so it can send maximum traffic to the parent website.

Blogs should be themed on the website: The content of the blogs should be built around the website that you wish to optimize. The niche of your blog will determine the type of links it will garner so to direct relevant traffic to your website write on related topics. Also, your blog can start attracting free traffic from social bookmarking sites around the niche.

Optimizing the title: As with article directory submission, blogs too should be optimized by giving correct titles to blog posts. Include keywords in the title and try to keep the keywords in the beginning of it, because that is the route the search engine spiders take. A good title is also essential for catching the attention of a reader.

Winning subscribers: Getting a reader to subscribe is important because chances of conversions increase with regular visitors. This can be done by adding a prominent RSS feed button or offering subscription via e- mail or adding a line at the end of the post that says-‘Liked this post? Subscribe for more.’

Update with new blogs: Especially in the beginning few days of starting a blog try to post once a day. Write about the new products/ services on your website, illuminate readers to their benefits and leave a link to the website. This is important because search engines index active blogs fairly quickly, giving them higher Page Rank. This will ensure that your blog appears on the 1st result page, in plain view of net searchers.

Communicate with other blog writers: Browse for quality blogs on related topics and interact with their writers through meaningful comments. This is the best way to build links and direct traffic to your website.

Follow your commenter: Respond to genuine comments that you get on your blog, engage the commenter with queries etc., you can expand on the benefits of your products/ services but do not be too pushy.

Directory Submission: Manual directory submission of blogs to high PR blog directories will get you natural contextual links. These quality links will drive huge traffic to your website.

Blogs are a natural search engine driver. By choosing the right keywords, good content, regular post updates and right directory submissions, they can become instrumental in increasing traffic to your website.

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How does social bookmarking work for SEO?

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Social bookmarking is a way to save your favourite web pages online on social bookmarking sites. By social bookmarking you can save links that you want to remember and access them from any computer, anywhere in the world and share them with other people. Bookmarks are usually stored with tags or categorized according to content etc. Now social bookmarking has become so widespread that it is looked upon as the ‘alternate search engine’.

Social bookmarking has become essential for search engine optimization of a website because it is fast becoming the preferred vehicle for searching the internet. Search engine spiders are software, used to locate and classify information whereas in social bookmarking all classification is done by humans. As someone comes across an article, blog or a website and bookmarks it, it is stored with similarly tagged web pages. Since the content has been scoured by a fellow human, the segregated information so collected under different tags offers a more concentrated result of relevant content when one types in the search keywords.

Social bookmarking is a great medium for SEO of your website but the trick to doing it correctly is to get others to bookmark your site/blog. Bookmarking your own site is against SEO ethics. What you need to do is to make your webpage really interesting and add a ‘Bookmark me’ button to each page. Once a page or website gets bookmarked, it becomes a strong contender for high page rank, because search engines really trust social bookmarking sites.

Your website becomes very visible once it is socially bookmarked because browsing social bookmarking sites is becoming more and more popular and the chances of your website being found increase manifold. The more your website is visited the more back links it builds, thus compelling the spiders to put the website in the 1st search engine result page.

Each Social Bookmarking site is a hub of different types of activities for e.g. Digg and Propeller are social news sites for current affairs, TechNet is for IT professionals, Del.icio.us, Simpy and Backflip are some other popular bookmarking sites. So for successful SEO of your website by social bookmarking, select the appropriate sites.

To make social bookmarking easier, you can use social bookmarking tools like ‘AddThis’ and ‘ShareThis’. They are integrated into a website by using a web widget. AddThis allows a visitor to your website to bookmark a page through popular sites like Facebook, Myspace and Google bookmarks. Similarly ShareThis lets a visitor share any content including photos, text across sites like Digg and Facebook. These tools can be used on any site to drive traffic and enable your website to go viral. Customized versions are available for leading blog publisher sites including Blogger and WordPress.

Just as manual directory submission is preferred for directory submission, social bookmarking too can be made more effective by manual submissions. Indiscreet submissions can do more harm than good and expose the website to the risk of being banned as spam. Social bookmarking can be a great SEO technique if employed correctly.

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Is W3C validation important for SEO?

Friday, August 20th, 2010

W3C is a tool which goes through a webpage and shows different errors which might be present in it. This is a free tool and the main function of this tool is in helping to weed out coding errors from a webpage. There are mixed opinions on whether W3C validation is important or not.

The W3C Validation does not affect search engine ranking. Matt Cutts from Google has already said that Google does not consider W3C validation for their search engine ranking. There are various reasons why using W3C validation for search engines can be tough. Primary job of search engines is to provide accurate search results. So if a search engine does not consider a website (having relevant content) in its search results just because it does not satisfy a standard, then the whole purpose of search engine will be lost. Also it would take a lot of time to load a website if search engines start validating a website. The bigger a website more time it takes for validation.W3C validation does not ensure that all browser compatibility issues can be removed. This means even after spending considerable time in making a website W3C compliant, there is no guarantee that a webpage will turn out perfect across various browsers. This is another reason why Google does not consider W3C validation for its search engine ranking. There are many websites including many top rank websites who do not have a W3C validation for their website. In fact many search engines themselves do not have W3C validation.

Having said that, W3C validation does help in making a website clean. It helps to eliminate human errors while coding.W3C validation leads to a faster, leaner code with better use of semantics. And all these are the criteria which search engines like Google consider before coming up with search ranking. Clean website means that search engine spiders will not get confused by unnecessary coding; they can easily crawl and explore a website without any hindrance. Having a code with error can turn out to be an unpleasant experience for your customers as the pages may not load correctly in a web browser. W3C tool can sometimes help in finding defects which can turn out to be a major problem for your website later. So even if 100% compliance may not be necessary, W3C tool can be used to look into various errors and remove the ones which can cause much impact on your website’s overall performance. You also need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing before deciding on whether or not to opt for W3C validation. It may so happen that you are in such a field where all the major websites do have a W3C validation, then in that case it will be a good idea to get one yourself too.

W3C validation complements your other outsource SEO efforts like directory submission, article directory submission, blog writing and submission, social bookmarking, PR writing and submission etc. that help rank your website better with the search engines.

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Black Hat vs White Hat SEO

Friday, August 20th, 2010

The success of online marketing depends on the number of people you can lead to view your website while performing a particular search. With this Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into picture. SEO techniques can mainly be categorized into:

1.Black Hat SEO or
2.White Hat SEO

1.Black Hat SEO :It refers to the illegal or unprofessional procedures used to direct greater number of search engines and searchers to view the website. Black hats usually do not adhere to all rules and regulations laid down by search engines.

Some of the key methods used for Black Hat SEO are -

  • Keyword Stuffing: It involves putting too many keywords in the content to get more number of search engines and browsers to reach them as keywords are the main source of getting traffic onto a website.
  • Link Farming: It’s a network of interconnected pages that link to each other within the group. It works by directing the user from the main site towards the linked sites. However, certain features of this technique led to its detection by the web spiders. Thus when such content or pages were found during search they were automatically removed and hence link farming became less popular.
  • Cloaking: It’s a technique where the content is designed using server-side scripting to be viewed differently by the search engine spiders as compared to the usual searchers. By using this method unethical content can be hidden from the spiders.
  • Hidden Content/ Invisible Text: This method allows the content to appear useful to the browsers by hiding the stuffed keywords and phrases which are visible only to the web spiders. Certain techniques used to hide content are – having the text and the background in same colour or making the text size extremely small.
  • Gateway pages: Commonly known as a doorway page that is not visible to the browser and acts as a bridge. The gateway is just another way of getting more number of searchers to view the site.

2.White Hat SEO :It involves using ethical means to get the site into top search results. It ensures that the content made available to the web browsers is genuine, of good quality and makes appropriate use of the keywords and phrases. Hence such sites are more relevant and search engines are able to crawl and index them more easily.

As we compare the two, we see that the techniques used in White Hat SEO are similar to that used by the Black Hat SEOs, but the difference arises in the ways and means used. Sites adhering to Black Hat SEO techniques may have a temporary advantage but in the long run it may prove to be fatal. Black Hat SEO generated content is aimed at attracting the search engine spiders, while on the contrary in case of White Hat SEO, the content is made to be relevant for both the browsers as well as the web spiders. In many instances in the case of Black Hat SEO, it is difficult to assess the quality due to the content being invisible or hidden. While in the case of White Hat SEO, everything is transparent and nothing is hidden from general view.

White Hat SEO technique of directory submission is widely used to increase the incoming traffic on a website. The popular directory submission service helps to add the website’s link to the submission directories that increase the website’s visibility to the search engines. There are many SEO websites available online which provide automatic or manual directory submission services at competitive prices.

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Importance of keyword research and analysis for SEO

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Internet marketing is becoming a powerful medium to advertise online and offline businesses these days. Internet marketing crosses geographical boundaries and gives businesses a global appeal and wider audience. Various search engines help millions of user everyday to find exactly what they are looking for through their search engine sites. As users’ type in the words to be searched (better known as keywords) on the search engine site, the search engine goes through billions of pages in its database and gives various pages a score based on the relevance of the page. The higher the score of a webpage, higher is it ranked while displaying the result. Businesses, on the other hand, use something called as “Search Engine optimization” which relies on keywords to get higher rank for their websites. If the keyword used by a business for search optimization does not match the one used by the search engine, their chances of ruling the virtual world are almost over. So these keywords can turn out to be deal maker or deal breaker in the online market.

So if you are looking at tapping the online market you need to spend some time in doing “Keyword Research” on your own or you can outsource SEO needs to a well reputed affordable SEO service expert. Keyword research is a process that helps to find appropriate keywords which describe your business well and increase the overall ranking for your site. But keyword reach is not the only thing to look out for. Even if you do come out with some great keywords and get a higher rank for your website you may end up a loser. This may be because the area for which you are becoming a high ranker during web search is actually not your area of work, so you actually are not reaching your target customers. Thus, appropriate keyword research and analysis of relevant traffic via Google adwords and other ranking tools can greatly help in reaching out to your target customers. Only when the traffic reaching your site is of potential customers, i.e. people who are actually interested in your product, will you be able to convert them into real customers. An SEO search engine submission agency can be of big help with their professional knowledge and wide experience in locating the right keywords for your website optimization.

As there are so many businesses out there which offer similar services, keyword research becomes all the more critical. With so many businesses operating along the same lines they tend to use the same keyword for their search engine optimization. So even if you use a high ranking affordable SEO service keyword, your chances of actually ranking high might be slim since your competitors will also be using the same word. So proper research needs to be done to see how good are the ranking chances of using a specific keyword among the competitors.

Another thing to keep in mind is which country or region you are targeting. Some keywords which rank higher in some areas may not work well in another area. Also you need to concentrate on the spelling and local usage before deciding on a particular keyword.

Optimizing your website with relevant keywords, directory submission, social bookmarking and press release distribution among other things might just be the catalyst for your online business to take off with a big bang. Thus, whether you choose to outsource SEO to another agency or do it in house is a choice you can make; but to opt for search engine optimization or not is not a choice, it’s a MUST!

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Directory Submission: How much link juice does it provide?

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

A few years ago, you could rule the top ranks of Yahoo and MSN with religious directory postings. That is not the case anymore. For competitive Google Rankings you need to do directory submission and much more. But directory submission service is still a necessity and what you need to figure out is how to extract the most link juice from your submissions. For that you have to submit to the very best authentic directories. Here’s a stab at defining tier 1 directories:

Best way to submit is to key in on your niche. Make website directory submission to directories that will allow you to suggest new categories. Or try and make maximum submissions to niche directories. You will have the advantage of fewer links on the page and your link will become all the more relevant to your website.

Try and submit to free directories and those where you are not required to give a backlink. What the directory is conveying is ‘since there is no fees, money will not bias the listings.’

Make SEO directory submission to sites with strong editorial policies. Authentic directories, even if they charge a fee, won’t guarantee your website’s inclusion. What this means is that you are paying to review your listing, not to get listed. This means that there is real editorial judgment implied in the policy. The listings from such directories convey value to the search engines.

Try submitting in a geographical location from the user perspective. Generally, people have a tendency to hire someone local rather than far away.

You can own the search engines with directory submission if your field is niche enough. But for general categories and competitive Google SERPs, you need to do directory submission and then some more search engine optimisation.

It is always better to go slow with the directories, make submissions over a period of time rather than hammer them for a solid few days! This way you come across as a serious and trustworthy website to the search engines.

The link juice from directory submission to ‘hard to get into’ selective directories is higher than what you will get from hundreds of submissions to poor quality directories.
Directories that have earned lots of high quality back links from acclaimed editorial sources carry more value than those whose links come from SEO communities and paid sources.

The best way to determine if a directory will pass link value is to observe its ability to rank for its own title tags. Those directories that rank highly can surely provide a ranking boost to your site too!

And last but not the least, a visit to their category pages and listed sites should impress you.

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