DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

Posts Tagged ‘start’

Directory submission is one of the most useful long term SEO strategies, which is not just important but necessary for any website that wants to generate relevant internet traffic. As a website owner, you should definitely start submitting your site’s links to directories either through a service that submits to directories or as a do it yourself project. But before you start with your directory submits, here’s a list of some of the main things that you need to know about link building through directory submissions.

What Are The Advantages Of Submitting To Directories?

Directory submissions are one of the most successful SEO strategies that not only help in generating relevant traffic to a website, they also help in improving a site’s search engine rankings and Pagerank. Submitting to directories increases your link popularity, making your website rank higher in search results. Another major advantage of directory submissions is that once you have submitted to a few reputable directories, your website will automatically get indexed by search engines. Customers looking for particular products and services also use directories for reference, so submitting to reputable directories unfailingly leads to an increase in traffic to your site.

Which Directories Should One Submit To?

Once you plan to start your directory submissions, you will find that there are thousands and thousands of website directories that are vying for your attention. So which directories should you submit to? While a professional submission service might be able to submit your links to thousands of directories, it will be impossible for you to do it all alone without a software program. If you do not have the moolah to shell out for a professional service, start making manual directory submissions at the rate of ten per day, starting with directories that are highly ranked and reputable.

Submit to directories that deal solely with your industry and area of expertise or those which have a separate category for your business. Make sure that you submit to the best directories on the web like DMOZ.org and Yahoo etcetera. Submit to directories that keep getting constant upgrades, because search engines will give more points to links in directories that keep getting updated regularly.

What Strategy Should One Follow While Submitting To Directories?

There are hundreds of link building strategies that will help you in making efficient submissions, but some of the main things that really matter are the reputation and rank of the directory you submit to, its relevance to your own industry and the amount of exposure and visibility it provides to your site.

When making directory submissions, always use your site specific keywords while link building instead of using generic terms. Stay away from directories that already have too many ads, banners or other useless spam on their pages and those that are blacklisted by search engines. Remember that manual directory submissions are always better because most directories nowadays have become smart enough to avoid auto software generated submissions.

Who is this for?
If you are a webmaster who is about to start his/her first online business or web site, you probably know that it is not that easy to get high traffic to your site. In fact, nowadays it takes a lot more work to be successful online, than it had been some years ago. The main factor that influences your success is that most business or web site owner do not know anything (useful) about search engine optimization (SEO) and/or search engine marketing (SEM). These terms are wide-spread, however, a lot of people just know of it as a way to get ranked high in the search engines.
There are tons of webmasters and web site owners who would like to know more about SEO strategies in order to kick start their business. If you have enough funds to hire a SEO company to do the promotional work for you, you would probably not sift through the internet and find out more about SEO, unless you are eager to learn more and more. So this article is mainly for those who start out with SEO and want to know more about the strategies to not only rank high in the search engines, but also prosper and do well in satisfying visitors or prospects.
Why do I need SEO & SEM to rank high?
The question is why businesses and web sites do need to promote their web sites well these days, unlike some years ago, when everyone was about to submit to a few of the established directories and was seeing an increase in traffic through spreading the word. The answer is: A few things have changed. The search engines have developed very complex algorithms in order to find relevant web sites and separate them from the non-relevant web sites. These algorithms are quite complicated and not revealed to anybody outside of the search engines.
The problem is that, in order to reach high ranking and traffic, you need to prove your web site to be trustworthy and relevant for the world. Relevance can be reached through search engine optimization, whereas trustworthiness is reached through the marketing and promotion of your web site to other relevant and related web sites. There are theories about a so-called sandbox or trustbox that is used by Google, however, they have never been confirmed to be existing to 100%. This sandbox theory claims that every new web site is put in a box for a specified probation period. While in the box the site is not ranked well and does not receive a PageRank. The trustbox theory claims that the probation period is more likely to be defined by trusted and relevant back links.
Whether one of these theories is real or not, fact is that you need to optimize your business for the search engines and then promote it. The main thought is that you should try to gain as many one-way links as possible. One-way links, also referred to as inbound links, are link that are directed to your site without your site to be linking back to that site. In past the so-called reciprocal links have been wide-spread in order to build your linking and prove your trustworthiness and/or relevance. However, these days, one-way links are more than appreciated and worth it!
How to approach? How to gain one-way links and kick start my business now?
This is a very complex topic and it is impossible to tell you about any existing and proved strategy at once. Nevertheless there are some easy but time consuming ways to kick start your business or web site. Before everything can begin, however, you should first optimize your website. There are some resources on the internet that tell you about optimization etc.
After you are done with it, promote your web site to (free) web directories first. Web directories provide you with one-way links without the need to link back to them. Well, in fact there are a lot of directories that require reciprocal links back, but these are not the ones you should submit to. Submit to SEO friendly free web directories first, apart from the Open Directory Project/DMOZ. Then after you have done this exhausting work, write quality articles and spread them. Be active in forums. Publish a blog relating to your area and regularly write in it to attract readers and prospects. These are one of the main sources for getting your first traffic and back links, which raise your PageRank.
Now go on and find out about the variety of mistakes you can do while optimizing and promoting: Over Optimization.