As the number of websites grow everyday, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a new site to attain good rankings on search engines. Since major search engines factor link popularity heavily into their ranking algorithms, building relevant links to your site is perhaps the single most important component of search engine optimization.
For a new site with no or few inbound links, buying text links on more established related sites could provide a boost to your link popularity. But this strategy could prove prohibitively expensive, especially in a highly competitive market where you'd have to buy lots of links to catch up with the competition.
Web directory listing represents a viable alternative to link buying. Apart from driving traffic to your site through direct referrals, web directories provide one-way inbound links to your site, boosting your link popularity and ultimately improving your search rankings.
There are thousands of web directories on the net, with dozens sprouting up every day. Some are general directories; others cater to specific niches. Some are free; others charge inclusion fees. Some are free only if you provide a reciprocal link in return. Many feature both free and paid listings.
The main advantage of a paid listing is the luxury of having your site listed quickly above everyone else's. Free submissions may take several weeks or months for review. If you work on a limited budget, you may want to submit to a handful of paid directories and a few hundred free ones.
Some directories charge inclusion fees that are too high for the listing to be cost effective. When considering a paid listing, look at not only the Google PageRank of the homepage of directory, but also that of the subpage where your link will actually reside. While it may seem like a good deal to have your site listed on a PR5 directory for $15, the offer becomes far less attractive when you find out that the internal page where your link is placed is only PR2.
If you've ever submitted to web directories before, I don't have to convince you that the process is extremely tedious and time-consuming, especially when you submit to a large number of them. Unlike search engines that send out robots to index web pages, web directories rely on more detailed submission forms to gather information about your site. Since each submitted site must be reviewed by a real person, most directories require that submissions are also performed by a real person, as opposed to an automatic script. Many directories use a visual code verification process to prevent automated submissions. Apart from complying with the directory's guidelines, manual submission is the only way to ensure that your site is submitted to the proper category.
Because of the time involved in manually submitting your site and the sheer number of directories on the web, it's important that you know which directories to submit to. Obviously, you'd want to submit to only the high-PR directories and avoid the low-PR ones, right? Not really. Just because a directory has a low PR does not mean that it's not worth submitting to. The directory may be brand new and has not been around long enough to be ranked by Google. In contrast to the more established directories that continually experience a back-log of submissions, newer directories tend to review and list sites more quickly. As the directory becomes more popular, so will your link. So, don't judge a directory solely by its PageRank; rather, base your decision on the overall quality of the directory.
Another important thing to look at is whether or not the directory you submit to is search engine friendly. Search engines like static web pages whose contents stay the same regardless of who visits the page, or when they visit, not dynamic pages that are created on-the-fly. Browse to a couple of categories and look at URL in the navigation bar. If the URL looks like, http://www.godirectory.org/links.php?ax=list⊂=42&cat_id=245, it's probably not search engine friendly. An example of a static, search engine friendly URL is http://www.godirectory.org/dir/713/index.html (notice the ".html" suffix).
Another question to ask is: How easy it is to submit to the directory? How many hoops do you have to jump through to get to the submission form? When you finally get to the form, how many fields does the form have? A directory should ask for pertinent information like your name, email, URL, link title, link description, and keywords, but it should not look like a job application. With the exception of a handful of major directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, you should not have to spend more than 3 to 4 minutes to submit your site.
Another consideration is whether or not the directory has a category specific enough for your site. For optimal SEO benefits from your listing, your link should grouped under a specific category containing sites whose contents are related to yours. Such a grouping makes your listing more relevant in the eyes of the search engines, as well as providing an easier way for visitors to the directory to find your site.
Simply having your site listed on a directory is not enough. Your choice of the link title can determine how much impact your listing will have on your search engine rankings. Ideally, your link title (or "anchor text") should contain the keywords that you want others to search for to get to your site. Since most web directories require a unique link title, however, it may not be possible to select a common phrase like "Free Web Directory" as your link title. This title is likely already taken by another web directory. Simply prefixing the phrase with your domain name, e.g. "GoDirectory.org Free Web Directory", would make the title unique.
Oftentimes, a directory would have several related categories that are suitable for your site. How do you decide which one to submit to? Ideally, you'd want to submit to the category that has the highest PageRank. However, this may not turn out to be the wisest choice as your link may be buried among a zillion other listings. Going with a lower-PR category with fewer competing links may prove to be more beneficial. When choosing from multiple related categories, choose one with a good balance of relevancy, Pagerank, number of competing listings.
In sum, submitting to web directories is a highly effective link building strategy that should be an integral part of any search engine optimization campaign. Manually submitting to a large number of directories is both laborious and time-consuming. Just keep the above points in mind to make the most of your time.
http://www.content-corral.com/Article/Read-This-Before-you-Submit-to-Web-Directories/6186
Monday, July 9, 2007
Search Engine Optimization is no rocket science
Introduction
So you have completed your website, great! Now how are you going to attract visitors? If you do not let them know you're there, your visitors will never find find you. How are you going to sell products when users don't know that you exist? SEO will make your website noticeable on the internet, and this small guide will help you bring targeted visitors to your website.
Optimize your website
The most important part of your website is quality content. Search engines (such as google) will crawl your content and index it into a database. If your content does not match the product you are selling, you will not attract targeted visitors. It is therefore very important that you choose your (key)words very carefully. For instance, if you sell calculators on the internet, make sure you mention the words calculator, calc, math and more calculator related words on your website. However, be careful not to mention the words too often, or search engines might think your website is spam, which will result in a very low rank (search engine position) within the search results.
Linkbuilding
When more websites link to your site, the more attention you will get from search engines, which results in higher ranking. When you create and receive links from other websites to your website, make sure important keywords are used as anchor keywords in the hyperlink. If you sell calculators online, use a link such as; "buy calculator" instead of "click here".
Target your audience
Leave your link on website where your potential customers meet, for instance forums or discussion boards related to your website. Do not spam your website as this will be noticed by crawlers and will eventually result in a blacklist entry.
Offline targeting
Be sure to market your website offline as well. Advertise in local newspapers, tell everyone about your website, etc.
Add a sitemap to your website
When you want search engines to crawl your entire website, the best thing to do is adding a sitemap to your website.
Make sure searchbots can read your website
Searchbots can only read plain text.websites. No matter how beautiful your flash animation is, searchbots cannot read the content inside that animation. Therefore, try to avoid Flash animations on your website when there is content involved. Same story goes for JavaScript.
Do NOT use frames
Never use frames to design your website! Lots of search engines simply skip webpages with frames since they are a difficult to be seen apart from each other by visitors. For instance, if your framepage would consist of menu.html and content.html and your visitor would land on content.html, he would not have a menu to navigate through your website.
Stay away from bad neighbourhoods and don't spam!
Do not be tempted into leaving your link on abandonned guestbooks, forums or spam your link on every website you can find. Do not exchange links with spammy websites (such as pharmacy websites) either. The risk exists that google will classify your website as a spamsite and will block your website from any search results.
Jaap van de Wal is co-owner of Business-Web.org and guides people in setting up a full business website. Business-Web allows users to set up their online business without needing to know anything about HTML or webdesigning.
http://www.content-corral.com/Article/Search-Engine-Optimization-is-no-rocket-science/6634
Search Engine Optimization is no rocket science
Introduction
So you have completed your website, great! Now how are you going to attract visitors? If you do not let them know you're there, your visitors will never find find you. How are you going to sell products when users don't know that you exist? SEO will make your website noticeable on the internet, and this small guide will help you bring targeted visitors to your website.
Optimize your website
The most important part of your website is quality content. Search engines (such as google) will crawl your content and index it into a database. If your content does not match the product you are selling, you will not attract targeted visitors. It is therefore very important that you choose your (key)words very carefully. For instance, if you sell calculators on the internet, make sure you mention the words calculator, calc, math and more calculator related words on your website. However, be careful not to mention the words too often, or search engines might think your website is spam, which will result in a very low rank (search engine position) within the search results.
Linkbuilding
When more websites link to your site, the more attention you will get from search engines, which results in higher ranking. When you create and receive links from other websites to your website, make sure important keywords are used as anchor keywords in the hyperlink. If you sell calculators online, use a link such as; "buy calculator" instead of "click here".
Target your audience
Leave your link on website where your potential customers meet, for instance forums or discussion boards related to your website. Do not spam your website as this will be noticed by crawlers and will eventually result in a blacklist entry.
Offline targeting
Be sure to market your website offline as well. Advertise in local newspapers, tell everyone about your website, etc.
Add a sitemap to your website
When you want search engines to crawl your entire website, the best thing to do is adding a sitemap to your website.
Make sure searchbots can read your website
Searchbots can only read plain text.websites. No matter how beautiful your flash animation is, searchbots cannot read the content inside that animation. Therefore, try to avoid Flash animations on your website when there is content involved. Same story goes for JavaScript.
Do NOT use frames
Never use frames to design your website! Lots of search engines simply skip webpages with frames since they are a difficult to be seen apart from each other by visitors. For instance, if your framepage would consist of menu.html and content.html and your visitor would land on content.html, he would not have a menu to navigate through your website.
Stay away from bad neighbourhoods and don't spam!
Do not be tempted into leaving your link on abandonned guestbooks, forums or spam your link on every website you can find. Do not exchange links with spammy websites (such as pharmacy websites) either. The risk exists that google will classify your website as a spamsite and will block your website from any search results.
Jaap van de Wal is co-owner of Business-Web.org and guides people in setting up a full business website. Business-Web allows users to set up their online business without needing to know anything about HTML or webdesigning.
http://www.content-corral.com/Article/Search-Engine-Optimization-is-no-rocket-science/6634
Friday, July 6, 2007
Search Engine Optimization - Website Evaluation
Website Evaluation is the primary step towards providing search engine optimization support to your website. Before you start working on your website, you need to have ready initial report that gives you complete information on various aspects of your website. This report is handed over to clients by SEO companies. If the report is satisfactory, an SEO package is suggested.
What does a Web Evaluation Report consist of?
Web evaluation report is a blue print of your website. It pens down all the necessary information regarding your website. This information will help you understand your website better and plan out your SEO strategies accordingly.
The first aspect to look at is your overall website design. It is not necessary that a good looking website (attractive design) will rank high on search engines. Although a good design is essential to drag visitors to your website, search engines have set their own guidelines when it comes to website design. Webmasters across the globe design their websites along these guidelines, as they want their site to be crawled by the search engines on regular basis.
Along with having a good design, your website should be user friendly. If you want to rank well on search engines, you cannot ignore "users" that will browse through your website. A user friendly website is not far from being SEO friendly too. We at Nyasasoftec.com will suggest you necessary changes to make your website more and more user friendly.
The next step is to analyze on-page optimization factors. Again on-page optimization factors are more or less same for all search engines. Some of the commonly known on-page factors are keyword density, html tags etc.
Once the on-page optimization factors are done with, an online report is run using report generating (Google Analytics) to check the ranking of your website (for suggested keywords) on various search engines. Finally, all the above considerations are merged together which forms your Website Evaluation Report also commonly known as Initial SEO Report.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/search-engine-optimization-website-evaluation.html
What does a Web Evaluation Report consist of?
Web evaluation report is a blue print of your website. It pens down all the necessary information regarding your website. This information will help you understand your website better and plan out your SEO strategies accordingly.
The first aspect to look at is your overall website design. It is not necessary that a good looking website (attractive design) will rank high on search engines. Although a good design is essential to drag visitors to your website, search engines have set their own guidelines when it comes to website design. Webmasters across the globe design their websites along these guidelines, as they want their site to be crawled by the search engines on regular basis.
Along with having a good design, your website should be user friendly. If you want to rank well on search engines, you cannot ignore "users" that will browse through your website. A user friendly website is not far from being SEO friendly too. We at Nyasasoftec.com will suggest you necessary changes to make your website more and more user friendly.
The next step is to analyze on-page optimization factors. Again on-page optimization factors are more or less same for all search engines. Some of the commonly known on-page factors are keyword density, html tags etc.
Once the on-page optimization factors are done with, an online report is run using report generating (Google Analytics) to check the ranking of your website (for suggested keywords) on various search engines. Finally, all the above considerations are merged together which forms your Website Evaluation Report also commonly known as Initial SEO Report.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/search-engine-optimization-website-evaluation.html
Impact of Content Optimization in SEO
Content Optimization is one of the most important factors to get higher ranking on search engines. The phrase "content is king" is very popular among search engine specialists. A good quality, well written content works wonders for a website.
Why is content so important for search engines? When we say search engine, the first thing that comes to our mind is a place where you can find information. The primary purpose of every search engine is to give as much information as they can to its users. If your site is not informative, chances are that you might not rank well on search engines (big brand name companies are exception here).
Writers need to be skilled enough to write quality material keeping in mind the guidelines of search engines.. To write content for any website, you need to understand the primary business of the company. After analyzing the business, content writers go through the Keyword Analysis Report to check for suitable keywords. Using keywords within the content in appropriate density is the biggest challenge for any content writer. Using necessary HTML tags within your content (wherever required) is very important for search engine spiders. Many content writers ignore this aspect when writing content for search engine. The language of the content is also very important. You are promoting your product within your content, so it is important to have a language that markets your product but at the same time is simple enough for users to understand.
This was about writing fresh content for your website. If you already have content on your website, modify the existing content as per search engine parameters. While modifying existing content, you must check the keyword density and also the language of the content. At times writing a new and fresh copy of content takes lesser time than modifying an existing one.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/impact-of-content-optimization-in-seo.html
Why is content so important for search engines? When we say search engine, the first thing that comes to our mind is a place where you can find information. The primary purpose of every search engine is to give as much information as they can to its users. If your site is not informative, chances are that you might not rank well on search engines (big brand name companies are exception here).
Writers need to be skilled enough to write quality material keeping in mind the guidelines of search engines.. To write content for any website, you need to understand the primary business of the company. After analyzing the business, content writers go through the Keyword Analysis Report to check for suitable keywords. Using keywords within the content in appropriate density is the biggest challenge for any content writer. Using necessary HTML tags within your content (wherever required) is very important for search engine spiders. Many content writers ignore this aspect when writing content for search engine. The language of the content is also very important. You are promoting your product within your content, so it is important to have a language that markets your product but at the same time is simple enough for users to understand.
This was about writing fresh content for your website. If you already have content on your website, modify the existing content as per search engine parameters. While modifying existing content, you must check the keyword density and also the language of the content. At times writing a new and fresh copy of content takes lesser time than modifying an existing one.
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/impact-of-content-optimization-in-seo.html
Webecho Designs
webecho designs are ... a small West Australian web development company specialising in accessible website design and marketing.
Stylish, efficient and easy We produce only high quality, hand coded, custom built websites, ensuring lean code to maximise your websites' performance.
Search engine friendly Our website design packages come with basic Search Engine Optimisation including : Keyword Research, Competition Analysis, Content Advice, Search Engine Directory Submission.
Professional webecho designs offer much more than just website design and internet marketing. We provide an ongoing helpful service to make sure that your website continues to 'work for you'.
Accessible We specialise in accessible website design, meaning your website will reach more and exclude fewer internet users to maximise your potential custom.
http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Webecho-Designs
Stylish, efficient and easy We produce only high quality, hand coded, custom built websites, ensuring lean code to maximise your websites' performance.
Search engine friendly Our website design packages come with basic Search Engine Optimisation including : Keyword Research, Competition Analysis, Content Advice, Search Engine Directory Submission.
Professional webecho designs offer much more than just website design and internet marketing. We provide an ongoing helpful service to make sure that your website continues to 'work for you'.
Accessible We specialise in accessible website design, meaning your website will reach more and exclude fewer internet users to maximise your potential custom.
http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Webecho-Designs
SEO - search engine optimisation Pty Ltd
Here are the basic guidelines you need to follow to obtain high rankings in the major search engines;
1. Keyword Strategy Object to find out what termsyourendusers are actually typing in to find your business. Overture and Google provide keyword tools, and other third party companies such as Trellian and Wordtracker also have products. Your whole campaign rests on getting this right. Understanding your money keywords, the keys that give the greatest return is most important and then the long tail of variations and related keys.
2. Domains If you have not registered a domain then obtaining a domain that contains your main keyword will (currently) help your cause. e.g. www.travelinsurance.com.au . Note this cannot last however and long term building a brand will return you more in my opinion.
3. URL Directory structure When building your site having a meaningful url and directory sructure will pay dividends, both for your enduser and your search engine rankings. http://www.iflorist.com/en/act/item/2971/?nref=1 versus http://www.iflorist.com/en/bouquet/lillies.html. Structure your directories and urls so the information is grouped and the urls are keyword rich. That does mean doing something like this; http://travel-insurance.worldnomads.com.au/travel-insurance/travel-insurance.aspx which amounts to spam.
4. Site Technology Don't use flash to build your site, by all means use flash elements but remember how search engines work, they take text copies of your pages and store them in their databases for reference. Ensure site navigation is both logical, easy to follow and that search engines can follow the links.
5. Add Content Based on your keyword strategy build content pages for your main keywords or keyword groups. Content is King the more the better, noting it must be unique and not duplicated.
6. Meta Data Each and every page needs unique descriptive meta data. That mean page title, meta keyowrds and meta descriptions. Don't scrimp here this is important.
7. Obtain Incoming Links AKA Link Popularity To assist your site rankings, you need to obtain incoming links that contain in the anchor text the keywords you want to get rankings for. Register your site in on topic directories, approach similar themed sites and ask for a link exchange, publish articles, register your site in any trade sites. What you want is to be the center of the universe for your topic/products.
Sounds easy right? If you require professional help drop us a line at Sales@seo.com.au. We can either consult and give you a roadmap, or do the work for you.
http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/SEO-search-engine-optimisation/FullPressRelease.aspx?id=2315
1. Keyword Strategy Object to find out what termsyourendusers are actually typing in to find your business. Overture and Google provide keyword tools, and other third party companies such as Trellian and Wordtracker also have products. Your whole campaign rests on getting this right. Understanding your money keywords, the keys that give the greatest return is most important and then the long tail of variations and related keys.
2. Domains If you have not registered a domain then obtaining a domain that contains your main keyword will (currently) help your cause. e.g. www.travelinsurance.com.au . Note this cannot last however and long term building a brand will return you more in my opinion.
3. URL Directory structure When building your site having a meaningful url and directory sructure will pay dividends, both for your enduser and your search engine rankings. http://www.iflorist.com/en/act/item/2971/?nref=1 versus http://www.iflorist.com/en/bouquet/lillies.html. Structure your directories and urls so the information is grouped and the urls are keyword rich. That does mean doing something like this; http://travel-insurance.worldnomads.com.au/travel-insurance/travel-insurance.aspx which amounts to spam.
4. Site Technology Don't use flash to build your site, by all means use flash elements but remember how search engines work, they take text copies of your pages and store them in their databases for reference. Ensure site navigation is both logical, easy to follow and that search engines can follow the links.
5. Add Content Based on your keyword strategy build content pages for your main keywords or keyword groups. Content is King the more the better, noting it must be unique and not duplicated.
6. Meta Data Each and every page needs unique descriptive meta data. That mean page title, meta keyowrds and meta descriptions. Don't scrimp here this is important.
7. Obtain Incoming Links AKA Link Popularity To assist your site rankings, you need to obtain incoming links that contain in the anchor text the keywords you want to get rankings for. Register your site in on topic directories, approach similar themed sites and ask for a link exchange, publish articles, register your site in any trade sites. What you want is to be the center of the universe for your topic/products.
Sounds easy right? If you require professional help drop us a line at Sales@seo.com.au. We can either consult and give you a roadmap, or do the work for you.
http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/SEO-search-engine-optimisation/FullPressRelease.aspx?id=2315
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