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Get Listed in The Major Directories

 

There are two popular directories you will definitely want your website listed in: Yahoo and The Open Directory (DMOZ).

You won’t get a lot of traffic from the actual directory listing BUT having a link from these quality directories may actually boost your exposure in Google, Bing and Yahoo’s regular search.

Why?  Because many search engines are now looking at who is linking to your site in order to determine your rank for certain keywords.  So if they see you are linked from Yahoo’s directory or the Open Directory they may view your site as the “authority” on the subject and rank you higher.

 

Yahoo

 

 

Yahoo has a regular search function and a directory.  The regular search engine, which is used the most by web surfers, is free to get into.  All you have to do is be linked from other websites that are already included in their index and Yahoo’s search will pick you up eventually.

However, if you want to get into the directory, you’ll more than likely have to pay.

Even though the $299/year ($600 for adult sites) fee is for commercial sites, many non-commercial sites that really want to get in the directory end up paying because Yahoo can’t normally read all the free submissions.  They receive thousands upon thousands everyday and it’s just impossible for them to get to them all.

I haven’t heard of anyone getting into the directory for free since 1999 or 2000.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s very unlikely the free submission will get you listed.

It’s important to note that paying the fee does not guarantee your site will get listed. It only guarantees it will be reviewed in a timely fashion.

Also keep in mind that you do not get your money back if your site is declined. You do, however, get 30 days to appeal your listing. But the majority of the sites submitted this way do get approved. I would presume this is mainly because people are not going to pay $300 to submit a sloppy site so they make sure their site is polished and ready to go prior to submitting.

Another thing to remember is that Yahoo does not give priority listings or special treatment to people who pay the fee. Yahoo claims that your site will be treated just like any other site once it’s listed. This listing will NOT boost your ranking in their regular search results.

Again, the main benefit of a Yahoo directory listing is not the traffic but to have a link from a high-quality directory that may give your site credibility in the eyes of other search engines like Google or Bing.  Google places big emphasis on who is linking to you.

How to Submit to Yahoo

First, choose the appropriate category. 

Go to Yahoo.com and click on the directory categories until you drill down to the appropriate one for your site.

If you are not sure if you are in the appropriate category, do a search for your major keywords and look at the web sites that come up. Click on the category and then scroll to the bottom of the page.

Remember if your site is commercial then you will be submitting to the Business & Economy or Shopping section. Don’t try to submit a commercial site to a noncommercial directory to avoid paying the fee. It won’t work.

Once you’ve gotten to the appropriate category, scroll down to the bottom of the page and choose “Suggest a Site”. If you do not see this link then you have not drilled down deep enough into the sub categories.

If your site is commercial then you must use the Business Express submission that costs you $300/year, but if your site is noncommercial you can choose if you want to use the Business Express or Standard (free) submission.

Complete the submission form with the following in mind:

  1. Be sure you are submitting to the appropriate category or Yahoo will put your site in the most appropriate one. Some believe that if your category suggestion is way off, your submission will be ignored.
  2. Make sure the title you choose is the actual title of your site or Yahoo will change it.
  3. Keep your description under 15 words if possible.
  4. Make sure your description is editorial in nature and not promotional. Stay away from phrases like “the best marketing site on the net”. Also make sure your description accurately describes what your site is about or Yahoo will change your description! Check the description for sites that are already in the directory to get an idea of what Yahoo is looking for
  5. If you’re using the Standard (free) submission, wait at least 8 weeks to see if your site gets listed. Do not keep bombarding submissions to Yahoo. That’s a sure way to get ignored for good! If you are not listed in 8 weeks go back and make sure you submitted to the most appropriate category. Then check your site to see what you could improve. Also, look at other sites in your category and see what you may be missing. Do you have enough unique content? Did you check for typos? Is your layout consistent?

The Open Directory Project  (A.K.A. DMOZ)

This is another major directory that you may want to submit to. The Open Directory Project, http://www.dmoz.org (acronym for Directory Mozilla) is developed and managed by everyday people who are experts in their areas of interest. 

Unlike Yahoo, their entire directory is maintained by volunteers.

As of right now, it’s absolutely free to get your site listed here, but just like Yahoo, they do not accept all sites. However, they have been known to be a bit easier to get into than Yahoo. Of course, you should still be sure your site is polished before suggesting it.

The ODP powers directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the web, including the ever-popular Google.  If you can get listed in the ODP, you’ll eventually wind up in the Google search engine.

How Do I Submit to ODP?

Their submission process is very similar to Yahoo’s. First you need to go to the site and find your appropriate category. Then drill down until you find the best subcategory. Once you find the one you think your site belongs in, click the “Add URL” link in the top right hand corner of the screen and follow the directions.

Again, make sure that the title and description accurately describe your site. Don’t try anything fancy or your site might be left out in the cold.

One feature I do like about ODP is that you can contact the category editors if you have a question. For example, once I had a site that I submitted and it was never listed so I asked one of the editors and they told me that the content on my site was too much like a site that was already listed. So I went back and revamped my site a bit, resubmitted, and was accepted the second time.

Whatever you do, do NOT bombard the directory with submissions or you’ll be ignored quicker than you can say “ODP”. If your site is not listed, simply ask the editor of your subcategory (editors are normally listed at the bottom of the page).

I’ve found that it can take anywhere from two days to one year to get your site listed here. Please be patient when submitting. If you do not get in the first time, email the editor of that category. 

If the editor does not respond, go back and check your site again. See if there is anything you could tidy up (spelling errors, layout, etc.) then try again.  

Also make sure you are submitting to the most appropriate category for your site.  Unfortunately, not all editors will respond but occasionally you’ll find one that is polite enough to offer you suggestions for getting listed.

Popularity: 6% [?]


Free Link Exchange Program

One of the best ways to boost your search engine ranking is to ensure that you have plenty of links pointing back to your site.  In other words, you need to increase your link popularity.

 Why?

Because many of the popular search engines are using a lot of off-page criteria to help decide how relevant (or popular) your site is for certain keyword searches.

Let’s say you have a site about bowling and you want your site to show up in Google when people type in the search terms, “bowling balls.”

Back in the day, you used to be able to achieve a high ranking by cramming your keywords in the body of your web pages, title, as well as your meta tags.

Well this quickly grew old as people learned the techniques and started using this method to spam the search engines.  Webmasters were putting unrelated search terms into their meta tags and using hidden text to try and trick the engines into bringing their site more traffic.

As you may have guessed, engines like Google have gotten much smarter over the years and are now using the “backward link” technique to help rank web pages.

Google can determine the keywords other sites are using to link to a particular site and then they use that information to help decide how a page should rank for various search words.

Going back to the bowling ball example — if you go to Google and search for “bowling balls”, you’ll notice that the sites that appear first aren’t necessarily the ones that repeat the word “bowling balls” throughout the text.  Some of them don’t even have these keywords in the title of the page.

The reason these sites show up first is because of their link popularity.  Other web sites are using “bowling balls” to describe their site and are using these keywords inside the actual hyperlinks when they link to them.

So hopefully you can see now that when you exchange links with other web sites, be sure that they include the keywords you want to rank high for in the search engines.

Introducing Value Exchange – A High Quality Link Exchange

Value Exchange is a free tool that helps you find related web sites that are willing to exchange links with you.

Notice the term “value” in the title.  This is important because you don’t want to exchange links with just any web site. With Value Exchange, you’ll only find high-quality web sites with relevant information that can only help increase your link popularity.

One of the best ways to boost your search engine ranking is to ensure that you have plenty of links pointing back to your site.  In other words, you need to increase your link popularity.

 

Why?

Because many of the popular search engines are using a lot of off-page criteria to help decide how relevant (or popular) your site is for certain keyword searches.

Let’s say you have a site about bowling and you want your site to show up in Google when people type in the search terms, “bowling balls.”

Back in the day, you used to be able to achieve a high ranking by cramming your keywords in the body of your web pages, title, as well as your meta tags.

Well this quickly grew old as people learned the techniques and started using this method to spam the search engines.  Webmasters were putting unrelated search terms into their meta tags and using hidden text to try and trick the engines into bringing their site more traffic.

As you may have guessed, engines like Google have gotten much smarter over the years and are now using the “backward link” technique to help rank web pages.

Google can determine the keywords other sites are using to link to a particular site and then they use that information to help decide how a page should rank for various search words.

Going back to the bowling ball example — if you go to Google and search for “bowling balls”, you’ll notice that the sites that appear first aren’t necessarily the ones that repeat the word “bowling balls” throughout the text.  Some of them don’t even have these keywords in the title of the page.

The reason these sites show up first is because of their link popularity.  Other web sites are using “bowling balls” to describe their site and are using these keywords inside the actual hyperlinks when they link to them.

So hopefully you can see now that when you exchange links with other web sites, be sure that they include the keywords you want to rank high for in the search engines.

Introducing Value Exchange – A High Quality Link Exchange

Value Exchange is a free tool that helps you find related web sites that are willing to exchange links with you.

Notice the term “value” in the title.  This is important because you don’t want to exchange links with just any web site. With Value Exchange, you’ll only find high-quality web sites with relevant information that can only help increase your link popularity.

Popularity: 6% [?]


Top 15 on-page good SEO factors

I’m sure many of you people out there interested in SEO have read lots of SEO oriented articles and tips, but don’t you think that many of them are quite evasive ? That’s exactly what this article is trying to avoid. We’re offering you the top 15 precise on-page factors you need to take in consideration when you’re optimizing your page.

The goal of this article is to give you some concrete guidelines that you need to follow when you’re optimizing your page. Some of the factors that I’ll present have a greater impact on the search engines and others have quite a bit of controversy around them. I’ll mention this supplementary information on each factor and I hope to make it clear to everybody.
Here are the factors :

1. The title tag
It is generally accepted that the title tag had, has and surely will have a great amount of importance in the eyes of a search engine. So be sure to make it descriptive for your site, unique for each of your page and also readable.

2. Keywords used in your document
Again, a factor with very little controversy around it and that is considered to have a big significance for your SEO. In short, if you want to rank well for a specific key word, you need to create good and quality contest related to that key word.

3. Internal linking structure
Be very careful on how you link to your internal pages. Choose descriptive anchor text and make sure every page is available within 3 clicks from your home page. Also, an internal page linked from your most important pages will probably rank pretty good, while a page buried deep inside your site will have a hard time getting crawled and indexed.

4. Unique content
Having content that has been copied from another older and more significant website will get you nowhere. You will get banned and it will probably take a long time until Google decides to take another go at your website.

5. Outgoing links
Choosing to link to the right websites may actually prove helpful. It is best to link to websites related to your content, but careful about overdoing it, or you might lose a considerable amount of visitors.

6. Website age
Your website age seems to play a smaller role in Yahoo and MSN algorithms, as new but content rich website seem to be able to rank well soon after they have been indexed. With Google, it’s an entirely different story, as it seems to prefer older domains, even though their content is not as good as new websites.

7. The meta description tag
Alot less valued than in the past, because of the spamming it got, the description tag is still a tag to use because it has a bit of influence on the search engines, and even more, it may entice the people who search for your key words to click on your website.

8. Key words in your URL
Using your targeted keywords in your URL can tell the search engines that your website is more significant, and place it on a higher position. Use hyphens ( – ) to separate your keywords, or simply join them ( example : key1key2.com ). Don’t use _ , because it is treated as a different keyword.

9. Alt and title tags
Using the alt and title tags for your images can also prove helpful, especially for images you can click on, as these tags will act just like the anchor text on a regular link.

10. H1, bold, italic and strong tags
Highly controversial, it seems that these tags still keep a little amount of importance, although alot less in the past, because they have been heavily spammed. Don’t use them too much, or you might trigger a spam filter.

11. Page depth
In short, don’t expect a webpage buried deep inside your site to rank well. Still, it isn’t impossible it that page gets alot of inbound links or links from your most important internal pages.

12. Webpage language
Choosing the right website language can prove useful for regional searches, as your website may get a boost if the search is being made from a regional search engine ( example : google.jp ) or from an IP address in the same region.

13. Rate of content change
Some web pages rank well just by not changing for a long time, which shows they offer strong information, and others update their content very frequently and still manage to rank well. My advice is don’t edit your pages just for the sake of fooling the search engines. If you do edit your pages, do it for your visitors.

14. Webpage size
Webpage size ( both in KB and in the number of words ) is not a very important factor, but you can notice that, for the highly competitive keywords, only websites with a considerable amount of content about that subject manage to rank well.

15. W3C validation
Although it is highly unlikely that a crawler checks if your website is W3C valid, validation is useful because you give the spider information about the char set you use, so it can interpret your page correctly. And, if it’s a standard nowadays, why not go with it ?

Popularity: 5% [?]


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