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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 28 –Directory Submission and hiring somebody – Points to be aware of (contd..)

ashish — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:11:26 +0000

In the previous post (Directory Submission – Some points), I had talked about optimizing the Directory Submission process, including how to ensure that you are submitting only to high value directories, and start looking at manual directory submission rather than using software for the same.
In this post, I will be discussing more about hiring somebody to do the directory submission. When you start spending money on directory submission, you need to make sure that you are getting somebody who knows how to get the best value for you. One alternative that is always available is for you to do the directory submission yourself, but this is not free either. You would need to identify the right directories to submit, spend the time and effort required for the directory submission, and then monitor back about the success of the directory submission. If you are hiring somebody, then here is a checklist that that you should have handy:
- There is an option of manual directory submission vs. the software based directory submission. Over a period of time, it is becoming more obvious that search engines are able to differentiate between automated directory submission and manual submission, and prefer manual submission (where a human being does the actual directory submission, for each directory)
- Don’t go simply by price. Take the effort to find out the past successes of the firm offering the directory submission, and then decide whether the price for the firm or person who meets your requirement is a price you are willing to pay
- Many firms will quote submissions to 200 / 500 / 1000 / 2000 directories. Again, don’t go by sheer numbers, identify the directories to which they are submitting, and compare that to a core list of directories to which you would desire to submit your site. When people talk of 2000 directories, many of them are duds with no value, and you would be wasting time by submitting to such directories.
- Identify whether the submission service would be willing to submit different sets of keywords, description and tags to different directories
- Check whether the submission service will provide you a running list of directories to which they have submitted your site along with the status of these submissions (this is critical as sometimes, the directories could reject the submission for something minor and you would want your site re-submitted after taking care of the error)
- You would want a directory submission service that is able to provide you the ability to submit to only those directories within a specific PR range (even if they are a bit more expensive), since these are the links you would treasure highly
- With regard to the PageRank of specific directories, remember that the individual category pages of such directories (where your site would be placed) may be ranked much lower than the PR of the directory itself, so consider the claim of posting to high PR rank directories with a pinch of salt; the submission service may be technically right, but you may not be getting what you thought you were getting

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 25 – The importance and the need of Directory Submission

ashish — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:10:05 +0000

In the previous post (Need to have fresh content for SEO), we talked about the importance of having fresh content on a regular basis for your blog (and given that I suddenly got very busy, I had to break this rule and not post anything for 9 days). Anyhow, am back to regular posting.
This post and the next one will talk about Directory Submission, and its relevance to Search Engine Optimization. In previous posts, we have talked about getting inbound quality posts to your site making a huge difference to SEO. One way to do that used to be to buy links or go for link trading or go for link farms, but these sort of inbound links that are obviously not relevant / natural links are getting frowned up by search engines (although many people still believe by those concepts).
In such cases, one example of inbound links that are relevant and still relied upon by search engines are the public directories. These are lists of links categorized by the type of sites; so for example, if you have a site about software, a directory would list down the names and URL’s of sites (along with a brief description) that talk about software in its software section. It is these directories that over a period of time start developing Page Rank for these categories, and if you have your site listed in these categories, then it is very beneficial for your site. These directories in fact exist so that they can provide a number of relevant links to users, and in most cases welcome your efforts to add your site to their (as long as you have a valid and effective site) categories. And some directories are much more important than other directories. For example, DMOZ is a site that is used by many of the popular search engines as well, and getting your site in their is pretty useful. Another example is where this is this directory created by Guy Kawaski called alltop.com. Alltop.com has a Page Rank of 6, but its individual sub-categories also have a good PR. The Photography category, listed at http://photography.alltop.com/, has a PR of 5, and I have 3 of my blogs over there (‘5 Photo Tips‘, ‘Ashishs Photos‘, and ‘A lot of Photos, no touching up‘). Getting sites listed gets some good link love back to my sites, all the more so because these have been added after editing by a human editor, which makes the search engines depend on these directories even more so.
And there are many directories that are referred by other directories as well, so adding your sites to these directories will give you a lot of SEO benefits (and most of these links from the directories do not use the ‘nofollow’ tag which would prevent you from getting some of the link love).
One more advantage for getting listed in directories is if your sites have a lot of rich media content that search engines are not able to properly index and hence you do not get a benefit from search engines. However, when directories start listing your site, then you do end up with an advantage.
I will continue with this topic in the next post as well, since there is a lot to write about in this topic ..

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 22 – Understanding the search engines crawler

ashish — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:59:35 +0000

In quite a few posts on this site, I have mentioned terms such as search engine crawler, bot, etc. Many readers who are somewhat new in this field will not know what these terms means, and why they are important to you. So, a simple description of how search engines operate, and what do these crawlers do. When you enter a term in a search engine, it does not go searching off into the internet to find what you want, instead the search looks at a huge database owned by the search engine company and finds the relevant search terms. To make it even more clear, your site needs to be in this index, else you can forget getting visitors from search engines. So, how do the search engines create this index, and how does your site end up in this index ? Well, this is achieved through what are called search engines bots or crawlers, or robots. No matter what the term, these are automatic scripts whose primary function is to crawl through the internet, using the links present on web pages, and keep on making a copy of all the content that they find. These are very simple scripts, which really do not have the intelligence to be able to process Javascript, or images, or any other complicated stuff used on sites. Consider the experience as similar to using a text browser on your site, and then reviewing how your site looks on this text browser.
You can actually try this, look for a browser called Lynx (Wikipedia) and view your site on it. You will find that all your complicated JavaScript / DHTML / Flash based navigation is unrecognized by this browser, and it can get stuck. Similarly, if your site does not have easy ways of finding all the posts you have done (such as a sitemap or a simple navigation method), then many of those will not get indexed, and can prevent search engines from finding such posts and making them available to search engines.
So, this is one simple lesson. You need to make sure that whatever nice jazzy stuff you show to your viewers, you should have a way to let the search engine crawlers easy access to all your site, including setting up robots.txt file properly. Further, since the search engine crawler makes it way across the internet using links, you should be linked from other sites, and you should also be linking to many relevant sites.
Once the content is available in the search engines, they rank these based on extremely secret algorithms that constantly evolve. This search engine ranking is what determines how many people visit your site from search engine results, and also means that you need to be constantly at work to ensure that the search engines rate your site high, and any changes in how they use their ranking logic (including frowning on many practices) should be incorporated in your techniques.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 21 – How to select the right SEO consultant

ashish — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:20:27 +0000

By now, you would have learnt that Search Engine Optimization is one of the most critical items to ensure that your site / blog is popular, and there are a number of techniques and optimizations that you can do to increase the page ranking of your site (as well as some of the items you should avoid). However, many of you would have also learnt that it is not easy to do all this, with the techniques that are relevant getting modified over a period of time (and some of them turning negative over a period – as an example, earlier it made sense to pack your site with keywords, but doing so now can get your site penalized by Google and other search engines). Hence, it is fairly easy to rely on professionals to do this for you, and this is where SEO consultants come in – these are people or companies that promise to ensure that your site can do wonders in terms of increase in search engine rankings and in turn, some of them can be fairly expensive. However, hiring SEO consultants can do wonders for your site, subject to certain conditions and checks:
- Before you start hiring a consultant, do some research on your own, in terms of where your website ranks as opposed to your competitors
- Determine the keywords you want to rank for, find out where your website stands in terms of ranking for such keywords, and where your competitor stands for. Explore alternative keywords that are less sought after, but are still good enough to draw traffic
- Do a search for various companies and individuals who are involved in the business of SEO consultancy, including reading about their success stories and projects that they have worked on
- Talk to the company or individual and find out about their success stories, including whether they have managed to get their own SEO site listed in top ranks of Google. If they quote sites as as part of their success stories, then check for the ranking of those sites
- Ask the experts for the steps and processes they will take to promote your site, and find out whether they will be following White Hat strategies, or dubious strategies. Be very wary of experts who promise to bring your site to the front page results within a matter of weeks
- If a consultant or company claims that they will submit to thousands of directories and link farms, find out more. Many link farms are not rated well by search engines, and you can suffer if you are listed by such search engines
- Evaluate the performance of the consultant, and set out goals. Also talk to multiple consultants in terms of defining a possible time based strategy and result matrix before selecting one of them

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 20 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:14:17 +0000

It’s been a few days since I was able to post the previous tip (How to build links) in the series, and in the meantime, I was approached by a regular reader as to what was the problem. I had gotten caught up in something (mixing up of 2 different businesses), but realized that I need to be regular in these posts (they also help me in terms of being a refresh of tips and techniques). So, here goes the latest post:
- Look for links from Government sites or other semi-official institutions such as Universities. Those are highly respected sites in terms of search engine rankings, and if you are able to get some link love from there, then it can work real good for you. One way of getting links from these places is through writing research reports, or writing articles on subjects that people post as references. For educational sites, search for user forums
- Use article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/ to post your articles too. You can find a good collection of such article sites on the internet where you can post your articles, and this will help you in getting some good links to your site
- Search for sites that syndicate news or articles, and become a regular writer to these sites. Many of them allow you to post information about your site; this helps in getting more link love
- Make sure that your Submit your site to many directories such as DMOZ, Alltop.com, etc. Some of these directories are very highly regarded by search engines. There are a huge number of directories out there, you need to search for the more highly regarded sites and post to them. There are tools that allow you to post to a number of directories, evaluate them, and use them if necessary.
- Use sites such as Del.icio.us for bookmarking your posts and Digg / Stumble It for posting your posts, so that there is a higher chance of people picking up these posts and linking to them
- Use Yahoo Answers – search for questions and try to give the best possible answers for queries in your area. People will slowly pick out the better answer as the best answer, and that should help you
- Search for business directories (including Yahoo directory) and try to get your site listed over there
- Write on forums related to your area with quality content, and post your site as your signature. Good answers on forum get picked up fast, including by search engines
- If you are writing about gadgets, or other stuff on Amazon.cm, then write reviews for these items and post links to your site / specific posts in them
- Don’t get scared with all the talk about link-swapping. If you avoid the large link farms, and instead focus on other blogs / sites that are small and focused, it can help in terms of getting some good incoming links.