Most experienced webmasters ( in my niche, I am referring to fellow directory owners) are aware the fact that Google is changing its algorithym to provide better relevant and high quality search results to normal searchers.

Paid links are no longer going to influence SERPs results and gain you PR. In this regard I liked a comment made by a fellow member on digitalpoint forums with his ID being InsightInc — He said

“Seriously speaking, Google doesnt work for or care about Webmasters. They work for and care about individuals who are searching websites and pages that is relevant to search and content they perform on Google Search. The webmasters are themselves to blame for putting so much value on PR in the first place. Ofcourse this has turned into a business - but this business can drive Google out of business if webmasters continue manipulating the search results via paid link and other PR infringement. Hence they are having a long and hard think about the whole PR business and how to retain their No.1 Search Engine position before it becomes widely known that NO.1 spot on Google is more relevant to a webmasters work than the relevance of website itself - makes sense to me - what do you think?”

So I was thinking to do research on Viral Marketing as a means to promote my web directories rather than buying lots of now useless advertising spaces and share my experiences with my fellow directory owners.

While doing extensive research I chanced upon the most interesting article on Viral Marketing written by marketing guru Dr. Ralph F. Wilson . To my surprise-I found that he is actually encouraging webmasters to re-produce his article for educating people like me. So here it goes in its entirity–

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

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In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca”). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Put into practice

I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading — “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” (see http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm for an HTML version you can copy). But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyright statement, too, please. If you have a marketing or small business website, it’ll provide great content and help your visitors learn important strategies. (NOTE: I am giving permission to host on your website this article AND NO OTHERS. Reprinting or hosting my articles without express written permission is illegal, immoral, and a violation of my copyright.)

When I first offered this to my readers in February 2000, many took me up on it. Six months later a received a phone call:

“I want to speak to the King of Viral Marketing!”

“Well, I’m not the King,” I demurred. “I wrote an article about viral marketing a few months ago, but that’s all.”

“I’ve searched all over the Internet about viral marketing,” he said, “and your name keeps showing up. You must be the King!.”

It worked! Even five years later this webpage is ranked #1 for “viral marketing.”

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. In the next article in this series, “Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-deploy.htm), we’ll move from theory to practice. But first learn these six foundational principles of viral marketing. Master them and wealth will flow your direction.

“Copyright © 2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reprint this article on your website without alteration if you include this copyright statement and leave the hyperlinks live and in place.”

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

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