Every webmaster dreams of seeing his or her website on top of search results for the targeted keywords or key phrases. But to achieve that, webmasters have to optimize their sites through a method called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Search Engine parlance.

Today, Google is the most dominant Search Engine on the World Wide Web with above 70% of total searchers using it to find the information they want on the internet. Google uses a sophisticated technology whereby its bots/robots try to find the number of links pointing to a particular site that is related to the searched keyword or phrase. Of course mere numbers of links are not enough to put a site on top. The relevance of the site linking to it along with relevant contents are also very important.

Here comes the role of human edited web directories. These web directories are structured in such ways that they are like Pyramids –having categories and sub-categories related to any field on the web. Webmasters, whatever field their website might deal with can find a related backlink from a web directory. They work as the stepping stones for new websites by providing the much needed backlinks for quick indexing or crawling by search engine spiders.

Of late, there has been lots of criticism of web directories and many have termed them as link farms offering just backlinks to web sites and nothing more. While, the argument holds some truth – it is highly inaccurate. With the exponential growth of the internet and the flourishing web directory industry, many greedy webmasters are starting web directories just to cash in on the phenomenon. Most of these directories free directories made for AdSense and are mirror sites of others and owned by the same webmaster. Google is well aware of this fact and fortunately it is dealing with them swiftly by de-indexing those sites.

However, there are some high quality web directories that offer valuable web resources to the surfers and also quality listing opportunity to webmasters. Aviva Directory, Alive Directory, Best Of The Web,  are some of the high quality web directories. The most common feature of these quality web directories is that, they charge a nominal fee to review a particular web site. While many oppose these kind of fees charged by these web directories, owners of these directories have argue that – they have to charge a nominal fee for reviewing websites because

1) It costs to maintain high quality editors to review/edit listings.

2) It costs a lot to hire SEO specialists and maintain the quality.

3) It cost a lot to install extra modules so lots of additional information about listings may be offered to visitors.

4) It works as a deterrent against web spammers.

Few months back, Google initiated a crackdown on Paid Links and some web masters reported renowned web directories for selling paid links on Matt Cutts’ Blog (Head of Anti-Spam Bureau of Google). But they were disappointed by Matt Cutts’ reply who endorsed the review fee policy of quality web directories by saying-

”

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

”

There is always a dilemma among webmasters whether to submit to hundreds of free web directories that cost little by way of submission fee or list in a few quality web directories that might cost higher depending on the number of directories one wants to list. To find out the answer, John Scott, CEO of V7N Internet Marketing Resource –did an experiment.

• He put two similar sites with similar contents (not duplicate) online.
• Submitted one site to 700 Free directories
• Submitted another site to 5 quality paid directories.
• After couple of months – the results started to show.
• The site he submitted to 5 quality paid directories ranked much higher on SERPs than the site which was submitted to 700 free directories not to mention higher Page Rank and higher traffic to the former!

So his experiment proves that 5 high quality directories can perform much better than all those free directories which are just taking up web space.

But all webmasters must remember that, not all Free directories are useless. Some of the high quality free directories that come into my mind are DMOZ (ODP), World Site Index , Web World Index, Abilogic. Webmasters have to have a very clear-cut strategy while dealing with web directories. They have to remember one thing though – IT IS QUALITY THAT COUNTS, NOT THE QUANTITY.

Some Use Full List of Web Directories

1. Aviva’s List of Strongest Directories based on SEOMOZ‘ Page Strength (PS) metric.
2. Bob Mutch’s list of directories based on Inbound Quality of Links
3. VS Dans List of SEO Friendly Directories
4. Jim Westergren’s List of over 700 Directories
5. Directory Critic -the watch-dob of the directory industry has a huge list of web directories

By LORDWOLF  Proudly brought to you by Best Internet Resource 

Submitting your site to the search engines is a pain, make no
mistake. But with a top twenty listing on Webcrawler alone
having the capability to bring 50 visitors a day to your pages
it’s a pain that is worth suffering.

There are a great number of search engines around, but only the
top 15 or so really generate serious traffic for most sites.
Many of the lesser
search engines are ‘meta search’ types, meaning they actually get
their results from the bigger engines anyway.

Of the main engines, there are two categories - Directory based,
and Spidered based.
The Directory based (which includes Yahoo, Looksmart and the Open
Directory Project) are generally added by hand. This means an
editor for the chosen category looks at your site and awards it a
position (or not) based on how he/she rated it.
The Spider index types, (including Lycos, Inktomi and AltaVista)
use robot browsers to check and index the sites based on
pre-programmed criteria.

In general, to get a good listing in the Directory engines means
you must impress the editor with the look, ease of navigation and
content of your site. Make sure your first page loads very
quickly (empty your browser cache before checking) as this is an
important factor. If your ‘front’ page doesn’t open within 10 -
15 seconds you will not get a high placement. If need be, create
a simple ‘Welcome’ page that opens quickly and use it as a front
door to your site with the more graphic laden pages with in it.

With Directory engines, if you have midis on your page be sure
you include an “off ” control. You will be penalized if not.
Don’t over do images or clutter - the editors read hundreds of
these sites a day and will be likely to have a lot in the queue
behind you. They want to judge your site rather than your taste
in art or cartoons and music selections.

Spider based engines are more predictable. Spiders scan your
pages looking for your keywords, count the number of times the
keyword occurs through out that page, and measure it against the
overall length of your text to calculate how relevant your site
is to the keyword.

Your keywords need to be set in the keywords meta tag, and should
also be included in your description, and to occur AT LEAST once
in the first 200 characters of text in your page. For this reason
it is wise to not try to target too many keywords on a single
page, try to pick simple word-pairs. Make sure you pick phrases
or words that you will repeat several times in the actual text of
your page and that they describe your site to a viewer not to a
robot.

For the same reasons of relevance to keywords, try to stick to
one specific topic per page. If you deal with two different
topics then you risk the chance of only 50% of the page being
deemed relevant to either topic.

Assuming your site is now optimized to be rated by the engines
you need to start submitting. There are some tricks to this too.
Firstly, submitting to FFA (Free For All) Links pages is a good
idea. Most spiders will place your site far more highly if they
have found lots of other sites linking to you. Once you submit
to any Spidered Search Engine you should add your site to as many
FFA pages as you can find, once per day, for about two weeks. You
will get a lot of junk mail in response to these submissions -
one from each site generally, but most have exactly the same text
in them so you can set your mail program to automatically delete
them by using filter settings.

The best value listings of all are the Inktomi database. Those
used by Yahoo, Hotbot, ICQit and many others, and the ODP (Open
Directory Project) which is used by a list of Engines too long to
even consider listing. Getting into the ODP database is now the
only way to get listed in the AOL net search. AOL use spiders to
index sites found in the ODP directory so you can see why it
would be so important to be listed.

Top Five Directory Databases
(1) Open Directory
(2) Snap
(3) Yahoo! Web Sites (Inktomi)
(4) Yahoo! Directory
(5) LookSmart

Normally, you will submit to these directories one time for a
given web site. It is extremely important that you submit to them
correctly the first
time and choose the very best category. Be aware that it’s often
difficult to get a directory to change your listing later unless
you send them a letter of explanation.

Here’s where it gets complicated:
Submitting to
(6) HotBot (an engine) - will get you listed in all Inktomi
based engines.

(7) Netscape: Netscape draws its results from Open Directory
first. If no matches are found there, then it searches
(8) Google. Therefore, we submit to Open Directory (a directory)
and Google (an engine) to become listed on Netscape.

(9) AOL Search: AOL will search Open Directory listings first.
After those matches are displayed, it will then draw results from
Inktomi. Again, we submit to Open Directory using our directory
guide, and to HotBot to be fully listed in AOL Search.

(10) Magellan: By submitting to Excite will get you listed here.

(11) Excite will get you listed in Magellan. They pull from each
other’s database.

(12) MSN: MSN draws results from LookSmart.com first, then after
that, matches are displayed from
(13) AltaVista. Therefore, we submit at www.looksmart.com (a
directory) and to AltaVista to be found in MSN.

Additionally there are very popular Search engines to submit to
that can be found on many web sites using search box’s.

(14) Infoseek/Go Network
(15) Lycos
(16) Planet Search
(17) WebCrawler
(18) What-U-Seek
(19) WhatsNu
(20) Northern Light
I hope the information given will aid you to get your sites
placed in the search engines so give some thought to your
keywords, check your load times, make sure your site is easy to
navigate, and get submitting.
To learn more about how Search engines rate sites and other tips
I would recommend visiting
http://www.searchenginewatch.com

———————————————-
Resubmission’s are just as important

———————————————-

After all the hard work you’ve done to submit your site, don’t
neglect it by hoping you will stay on top - YOU WON’T!
You must resubmit your site at a min of every 4 weeks. There
are some great programs and sites out there that can submit your
site for you so be sure to book mark at least 3 sites if you
don’t have sumitting software.

I use a calendar here to remind me when I am due to resubmit.
But for beginners the easiest thing you can do is, submit on the
1st of every month. Your site will remain fresh in the databases
and show it as a current site submission. With the information
above you are armed now
so you know what sites will give you the best results.

With out question you NEED to get listed in the ODP site - though
the evaluator may be your competitor and my not register your
site in his section, this may not be the case with other link
categories that follow the the same theme. You want to be listed
in as MANY categories as you can (what’s the worst that can
happen? They say no?) So submit to each available listing in the
main category.

—————————-
Linking to other sites
—————————–
Who should you try to get to link to you? In simple terms,
anyone and everyone. In more practical terms however, it depends
on the effort and what you have to give up in return.
Exchanging a banner ad on your site for a link from a high
quality busy site may be extremely valuable for attracting new
visitors. The banner may however, redirect your hard sought
visitor to the banner site and away from yours.

Banners also tend to clutter a web page, increase the load time
and distract your visitors. You can only put up a limited number
and then what do you exchange?

When was the last time you cruised a link exchange site looking
for somewhere interesting to go? The fact is people look for
sites with search engines or by search lists and recommendations
at related sites. Link exchanges will produce few if any
visitors and if they do they will probably not be prime
candidates for your product or service. That is not unless you
have a link exchange site yourself.

Not necessarily. There is actually a growing value to having
these links to your site. As previously mentioned, many search
engines, especially second generation engines, are starting to
use site popularity as a way to rank your site. In other words,
a site with 100 links to it will rank higher in the search
results than a site with only 5 or six. It is consequently
important to establish links to your site both for the traffic
they can generate directly and for the indirect value of
improving your search engine ranking.

Although Link Exchanges may be of value, it is better to put
your initial efforts into exchanging links with other related
sites. Not only will they generate more visitors, the visitors
they do generate will be better qualified.
What about competitors? Sometimes competitors attract viewers who
may not find exactly what they need. If you allow your
competition to also have a link what’s the harm? The idea is to
attract the viewer. link pages if you have a lot of links and
put any Link Exchange banners on your site. Put these at the
bottom if you do decide to use them all to often these banners
will hang while loading and cause the page itself to hang - most
viewers will not wait long so play it safe, and put it at the
bottom. This way the viewer can still see your site and then the
banner later.

Joining Web Rings related to your topic if one is available or
create one if not is another option available to attract viewers.
With E commerce now on the rise shoppers want to find the best
deals by having all the related competition in one ring it makes
it easy to find what and were the best deals are. The key to
using rings, is in the registration of the page - you must use
the full URL address of the page that will host the banner for
that ring. This is especially important if your site uses frames.

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LORDWOLF AND IRC HELP RING
Email: mailto:irchelp@lordwolf.com
Join our help ring for irc at
http://www.lordwolf.com/

By David Gikandi  Brought to you by Best Internet Resource 

We all know it and we all do it. Whenever the typical web user needs to find something on the web, he or she will almost always instinctively go to one of the top search engines and run a search. Then, he or she will have a look at the first 30 search results returned (usually the first three pages of results), hardly ever looking beyond that. If nothing looks appealing, they will run another search using a variation of the keywords they used on the first search. Again, they will look at the first 30 results. If they still find nothing of interest, they may switch to a different search engine and repeat the process. This, believe it or not, is the typical web navigation behavior of at least 86% of the 110 million all web users out there. The question is, does your web site capitalize on this behavior?

If the answer is yes for you, then no matter what a user searches for that has any relation at all to your products, they should find you even if they hadn’t thought of finding you! That translates to a very high amount of daily traffic to your site. Is this what is happening for you?

I bet the answer is no. Very few web sites really capitalize on this behavior. However, you can learn how to do so. For this tutorial, we shall assume that you are in the business of selling wedding gowns. You have a web site that does a good job of displaying your wedding gowns, but like most other web site owners, your web traffic is really low and clients are simply not finding you. You have done everything you can think of, but your pages hardly come up on the search engines. What next? Well, get ready to learn one of the most effective online marketing strategies.

We know that the web user will think of a keyword or phrase and type that into a search form on an engine. That is his or her first step, and so it should be ours. This is a very important step! Get a piece of paper or open up your text editor and keep writing all the keywords and phrases that you think of as you go through the steps outlined below. Selecting the right keywords or keyword phrases will skyrocket your traffic. Research has shown that most people use phrases of 2 to 3 keywords when searching. People have come to learn that just typing in one keyword in a search will get them thousands of records that they just do not need. Therefore, they combine two or three keywords in their searches.

Your list should end up having about 50 or more keywords and phrases. You must write down every word that a person might use to look for your site PLUS words they may use to look for other related information or products. This is no easy task. It involves some research and a fair bit of thought. Remember, thousands of people out there looking for wedding gowns may not all think alike, look for wedding gowns directly, or even realize at the time that they can get wedding gowns on the net! To get a good list, here are the steps that you should go through. Keep your pen and paper handy so that you keep writing as you go along each step.

1. Think! Brainstorm! Sit down for several minutes and think! Write down whatever keywords or phrases come to mind. Then look at your list and see what other word combinations you can make out from the keywords you have already written down.

2. Look at your products and services and see what words relating to them will pop up in your mind. Write the names of each product or service that you deal in. These product names will also be part of your keyword list.

3. Ask your family, associates, clients, and friends what words and phrases they would most likely use to search for products or services like yours.

4. See what keywords your competitors use. See what keywords are featured on their pages and in their meta tags.

5. Be specific AND general in scope. Think of words that also describe things related to what your site is about. For example, if you sell wedding gowns, also think about other things and words related to weddings, such as honeymoon, bridal registry, wedding rings, engagements, and other wedding accessories and services. The idea here is to capture people who may be looking for other things related to weddings, whether they are directly looking for wedding gowns or not at the time. Chances are that someone looking for any wedding related information will also be interested in knowing about wedding gowns. Get the idea? This is a very powerful way of getting more targeted traffic to your site.

6. Do not forget misspelled words. People often misspell words when they enter their search terms. Include commonly misspelled words or phrases as part of your list.

7. If your site deals with a particular region, remember to include that in your keyword list. E.g. ‘Los Angeles wedding gowns’ if you deal in wedding gowns within Los Angeles. A lot of people will search for wedding gowns, get a big list of returned search results, and decide to add the words “Los Angeles” (or wherever else they may be interested in) to get more specific search results.

8. Use the long and short form of words, e.g. consult, consulting, and consultants.

9. DO NOT SPAM! Do not use keywords that have nothing to do with your web site. Do not list the keyword “sex” or “free pics” just because they are frequently searched for if they do not have anything to do with your web site. You will only get traffic that is of no use to you anyway because surfers will come to your site and leave angrily when they realize you just cheated them. Also, search engines are on the look out for such deceitful practices and can sometimes ban your pages for spamming. As long as you stick with keywords related to your core business, you will be fine, but do not go way out of line.

10. Now its time for some research. You now need to look at what people are actually searching for on the various engines and get more phrases for your list. Here is a list of sites that will help you out with that. When doing your research at these sites, remember steps number 5, 6, and 8 above - people often misspell words, they use different word forms, and they may be looking for a whole lot of different stuff all related to your products.

(a) GoTo.com Keywords Inventory Search (http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/searchInventory.mp) - search for your keywords here and see how popular they were on GoTo.com. The service will also tell you what other related keywords and phrases were searched for. This is perfect for finding related keywords that you may not have thought of. For example, a search here for wedding gowns returns the following information:

Suggestions for: wedding gown
Searches done in March 1999
Count Search Term
2590 wedding gown
53 wedding gown designer
43 discount wedding gown
33 wedding gown rental
33 designer wedding gown
29 plus size wedding gown
27 low priced wedding gown
24 lazaro wedding gown
21 informal wedding gown
21 wedding gown pattern
17 vintage wedding gown
14 custom wedding gown
13 used wedding gown
13 wholesale wedding gown
13 victorian wedding gown
12 vera wang wedding gown
11 wedding gown online
11 demetrios wedding gown
10 amsale wedding gown
10 alfred angelo wedding gown
10 paloma blanca wedding gown
10 mon cheri wedding gown
10 los angeles wedding gown
9 wedding gown and supplies
9 wedding gown ivory
9 sweetheart wedding gown
9 galina wedding gown
9 eve of milady wedding gown
8 african wedding gown
8 western wedding gown
8 wedding gown at discount price
8 mori lee wedding gown
7 wedding gown restoration
7 full figured wedding gown
7 diamond collection wedding gown
7 christos wedding gown
7 casablanca wedding gown
6 emanuelle wedding gown
6 badgley mischka wedding gown
6 wedding gown in metro detroit michigan
6 wedding gown dress
6 venus wedding gown
6 prviate label by g wedding gown
6 wedding gown catalog
6 wedding gown bargins
6 wedding gown outlet
6 used wedding gown for sale
6 princess wedding gown
6 moonlight wedding gown
6 medieval wedding gown
6 romantic and sexy bridal or wedding gown
6 lazarus wedding gown
6 jasmine wedding gown
5 guzzo wedding gown
5 mature bride wedding gown
5 jessica mcclintock wedding gown
5 how to make wedding gown
5 wedding gown in rome
5 wedding gown consignment
5 wedding gown texas
5 wedding gown for second marriage
5 wedding gown discount
5 wedding gown and veil
5 wedding gown maine
5 renaissance wedding gown
5 used wedding gown in southern california
5 wedding gown wholesale canada
5 wedding gown prom
5 wedding gown preservation
5 california wedding gown
5 bride wedding gown
5 discount wedding gown and supplies
5 dimetrios wedding gown
4 bargain wedding gown
4 carolina herrera+wedding gown
4 carmela sutera wedding gown
4 bianchi wedding gown
4 consignment wedding gown
4 cinderella wedding gown
4 dicounted wedding gown
4 amy lee wedding gown
4 jacquelin wedding gown
4 picture of wedding gown
4 michaelangelo wedding gown
4 hawaiian wedding gown
4 wedding gown in paris
4 wedding gown by galina
4 wedding gown search
4 uk wedding gown
4 used wedding gown for sale tampa
4 wedding gown used
4 wedding gown marys
4 wedding gown in emma style
4 short wedding gown
4 wedding gown preservation in edinburgh scotland
4 wedding gown pics
4 wedding gown history
4 wedding gown with bow
4 wedding gown under $300
4 wedding gown by alfred sung

(b) SearchTerms.com (http://www.searchterms.com) - See what the top 100 search terms worldwide were. Remember that it is not advisable to use terms that are not related to your web site’s content, but this service can still prove useful.

(c) SearchSpy (http://www.searchspy.com) - SearchSpy is a database of search terms captured from the top search engines. Use this to find even more words and phrases for your list.

Now that you are armed with your big list, what you do with it next is what will get you all the traffic you need. The next process is long and complicated if done manually, but there are ways of making this automatic, easy, and fast, saving you the agony of doing it yourself. This article is too short for the technical details on search engine optimization techniques, so I will just give you a quick explanation and a link to where you can get all this done for you automatically and easily.

Basically, there are 8 major search engines today - AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot, AOL Netfind, WebCrawler, and Northern Light. Yahoo is a directory so this technique will not work with it. What you need to do is figure out what kind of pages rank well with each of these engines. Search engines use a mathematical formula to rank all the pages in their index. It is hard, but not impossible to come really close to knowing exactly what kind of a page will rank well on a particular engine. Basically, the text statistics on a page are what are considered most by the engine’s ranking formulas. Now, for each keyword or phrase on your list, you need to create a web page that focuses on just that one keyword or phrase and ranks it highly on a particular engine. Because each engine ranks pages differently, you will need to create a different page optimized for each engine.

Stop and think about this strategy for a second. You have a list of virtually every phrase that someone interested in your products and other related products can ever use in a search. Then, you have pages that make sure they rank highly for all those searches. No matter what people search for that has any relation to your products, they will find you even if they had not thought of finding you! Do you now see how much qualified traffic you can get? It is amazing!

The only set back is the amount of work you would have to put into figuring out what kind of text statistics on a page will rank it well on an engine, then creating these optimized pages for your entire list of keywords for each major engine. That means creating about 300 or more finely tuned web pages! But do not worry! As long as you have compiled your list of keywords and phrases, there is an online service that will automatically create the optimized pages for you in a couple of minutes. SearchPositioning.com (www.searchpositioning.com) uses a set of online scripts to cleverly generate web pages optimized for the major search engines. All you need to do is give it your list of keywords and phrases, a short piece of text describing your site or business or products, and your email address (the pages are emailed to you as attached HTML files). To my knowledge, this is the only service on the web that works in this way.

Once you have your pages, upload them to your web server and either submit them to the engines if they aren’t too many, or have the engines crawl over them and index them by only submitting a page that links to all of them. That’s it! Now simply step back and watch your traffic skyrocket!

Granted, there are many other ways that people use to find new sites, such as following links on other sites, reading about sites on magazine, hearing from friends, etc. But no matter what other methods they use, they almost always use them in addition to using the search engines, especially when actively trying to locate new information. By knowing how to use the search engines to your advantage, you will become an empowered Internet marketer. No other method of marketing is so powerful, effective, and affordable (virtually free)!

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Gikandi
support@searchpositioning.com
SearchPositioning.com
http://www.searchpositioning.com