2008 January | 15 Digital Marketing

Archive for January, 2008

The Ultimate Guide to Directory Submissions

30.01.2008

Submitting to directories is a great way to build links and increase your search engine rankings. In semi-competitive industries it can produce great results. If you add article creation and social media marketing into the link building equation then you can achieve great results for any industry.

Free or Paid Directories?
When choosing directories going for the paid ones can be better, mainly because the links seem to last a lot longer. Many of the free directories seem to disappear or delete links after a year or so. However, there are a few free directories out there that should always be used - directories that have stood the test of time.

Niche or General Directories?
Submitting to a combination of both niche and general directories is usually a good idea.

For most industries there are a variety of niche directories out there - the best way to find them is through a search engine. Do a search on Google, MSN or Yahoo for directories in your niche area - those that come up in the first few pages of results are usually the best ones to use.

With general directories it’s better to go for those that are more established. The older a directory is, the better.

PageRank - Does It Still Matter?
Because directories are generally quite large, they need a certain amount of PageRank to get all of their pages indexed properly. However a high PageRank isn’t the be-all and end-all. Google’s recent crackdown on directories has made visible PageRank even more irrelevant when it comes to choosing directories. There are directories out there that have no PageRank whatsoever that can offer value.

If a directory is ranking well in the search engines then you can rest assured that it has enough PageRank. If you’re unsure then check how many links it has via Yahoo! Site Explorer or another link popularity checker.

Anchor Text
It’s always best to get the main search phrases that you are targeting in the links to your site. However this isn’t always possible and unfortunately many of the best directories won’t let you do this. Sometimes you can get around this problem by slipping in a search phrase at the end of your company name.

Before submitting, have a good look around a directory and get a feel for what you can and can’t get away with. Some directory owners will let you use a search phrase on its own, whereas others are very strict and will only use your business/website name. In between you have those where you might just be able to slip a search phrase in.

Doing your homework comes in handy - if you try to use a search phrase on its own and they change it to your business/website name then it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to get them to change it to your website name with a search phrase at the end. If you’d submitted it like that in the first place you may have got away with it.

Always try to get one of your search phrases in and vary the anchor text as much as possible - this will appear more natural to the search engines.

Varying Your Description
Many directories will provide you with your own page about your business. If you have the same description on every page across different directory websites, then many of these will be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and your links will get devalued.

To avoid this, write a unique and substantial description for every single directory (200+ characters works best). Make sure the descriptions accurately mirror your products and services and that they read well.

Deep Linking
Many directories allow you to add extra links directly to internal pages of your website. You should take turns in linking to different pages of your website using different variations of the phrases you’re targeting on each page. Using the same anchor text to link to the same page over and over again will appear unnatural to the search engines and this could work against you.

How Many Directories Should You Submit To?
There’s no fixed number of directories that you should get listed in. Work out a 12 month directory submission budget for each site and then do so many each week or month for the full duration.

When you’re building links to your site via directories or any other method, you should do it over time. Submitting to 100 directories in a week and then forgetting about it won’t be as effective as spreading the 100 directory submissions over a 3 month period.

The Top 10 Directories
Finally, here’s a list of the top free and paid general directories to get you started.

5 of the best free directories include:

Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/)
World Site Index (http://www.worldsiteindex.com/)
Domaining.in (http://www.domaining.in/)
Web World (http://www.webworldindex.com/)
Search Sight (http://www.searchsight.com/)

5 of the best paid directories include:

Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/)
Best of the Web (http://botw.org/)
Business.com (http://www.business.com/)
Aviva (http://www.avivadirectory.com/)
Ezilon (http://www.ezilon.com/)

By David Eaves
David Eaves has been working in the search engine optimisation industry for the last 5 years. More of his articles can be found at his SEO blog.

3 Fast and Simple Ways to Dominate Google Rankings

27.01.2008

I got into search engine optimization back in 1998. Of course back then SEO was a lot simpler than today. All the tricks like keyword spamming and invisible key phrases worked like a charm. Better still, little tricks like these were acceptable. Not anymore.

In fact, most old-school tricks don’t work today and many can get your pages banned. This is great news for you. Over the next few minutes I’ll show you how to make Google absolutely LOVE your web pages and help you jump to the top!

This is all you need to know… Search engines today place 90% or more of their ranking priorities on content and links. Keywords are still important, but more so in the text of your pages than in any sort of META tags.

Simple, right? It really is. The first step is to find the best keywords and place them just right in your web page text. Next you need to get great inbound links. And finally, you need to monitor your progress closely (and that of your competition.)

Part 1: How to Find the Best Keywords
Google gets more searches than any other search engine so let’s peek into their database. Check out https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in any keyword or phrase you can think of that you believe your target audience is looking for. Not only will it give you tons of data on that and related keywords, it will also provide “Additional Keywords to Consider”, which is a section at the bottom of the page.

BIG TIP: Try to use specific keyword phrases whenever possible. Let’s say you have a web-page dealing with floral delivery. Instead of just the word “flowers”, which has 233,000,000 competing pages on Google, try “send flowers”, which has 1/10th the number of competing pages. Better still, think like people speak (I.E./ I’m sending flowers to my mom.) As it turns out, a lot more people are searching for “sending flowers” than are searching “send flowers” and - here’s the best part - “sending flowers” has less than 1% of the competing web-pages as the search term we started with, “flowers”. Now that’s impressive! You have an advantage over about 99.5% of your competitors with just that single tip.

Now take the top three or four keywords (and keyword phrases) and list them in order from best to second best and so on.

Part 2: How to Develop the Best Possible Content
Content is king! If you take nothing else away from this article, make sure you take this. Producing search engine friendly, optimized real-person content is key to your success. Today’s search engines can read a page just like a human would. And thanks to natural text algorithms, they can easily tell if you are writing your pages for real people or just trying to get better ranking. With this tip, you can do both!

First, call a good friend and describe exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Now write it down, word for word, as close as you can remember it. If you can record it, that’s even better.

Now go back through your text and fit your top keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. If possible, try to get your third keyword into the end of your first paragraph or the beginning of the second paragraph.

Repeat this concept using only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make it fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.

Now do the reverse for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword at the top of the paragraph and end with your most important. This shows consistency.

Finally, try not to repeat any keyword more than three or four times per page. Make it flow naturally.

Part 3: How to Get Great Links and Monitor Your Site
Having quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine optimization success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. Next you need to monitor your progress and your site’s status (how search engines really see it). This will tell you not just where you are - but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we used to do all link work and monitoring by hand - and it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week - per site!) My advice to you is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the work for you. If you get the right product, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

I used WebPosition Pro for a couple years but switched to SEO Elite because it has automated linking, which I find to be the most time-consuming aspect of SEO. Both are excellent products for tracking and reporting however.

Number 1 Pick: SEO Elite
Cost = $167 (lifetime free upgrades and no annual fees)
My Results: 121 top 5 rankings on Google in three weeks - Mostly 1’s and 2’s.
Top Features: Finds best link partners; Automates link process; Provides great Site Monitoring
Comments: I bought SEO Elite in 2005 and have used every upgrade - never spending another dime. I retired my other three programs after using this for just three months.

Number 2 Pick: WebPosition
Cost = $389 WebPosition Pro or $149 Standard (plus $99 per year subscription fees for either)
My Results: 44 top 5 rankings in Google in eight weeks - Mostly 3’s and 4’s.
Top Features: Site Monitoring; Great reporting; Site Critic
Comments: I stopped using WebPosition because there were no automated linking capabilities. I did however really like the reporting.

Now you’re ready. Good luck!

By Michael Small
Michael Small is the founder of free SEO (search engine optimization) site SEOpartner.com and author of numerous search engine optimization books and whitepapers including the SEO Notebook.

Ecommerce Marketing–Increase Conversions With Effective Landing Pages

27.01.2008

Whether your advertising streams concentrate on PPC, SEO, newsletter advertising, or a combination of these and any other advertising models, the landing page is one of the most important factors to consider. Primarily, the landing page needs to closely match your visitors’ requirements but it also needs to be set up to convert and persuade those visitors to take the desired action. A desired action can be anything from signing up for a free newsletter or offer to making a purchase - a landing page should lead visitors towards this conclusion.

Meeting Visitors’ Needs Through Page Relevancy

The landing page needs to be relevant to those that visit it. This means researching your visitors and, specifically, what they are looking for. Search engine visitors can be more difficult to read, especially if they have arrived via a long-tail or non targeted keyword. However, the inclusion of SEO and PPC keywords identifies to the visitor that they are on the right page and that the page offers the information they want.

Page relevance has been mentioned within various Internet marketing discussions, and it’s important in landing optimization too. The landing page has to be as relevant as possible to the ad or link that directed a user to that page. When setting up PPC ads, banner ads, and article ads, this should be a simple concept. You know the keywords and you know the content of the ad that led your visitors to that page.

Page relevancy only becomes more of an issue for SEO campaigns. While you undoubtedly target certain pages to specific keywords, visitors have a nasty habit of using completely different keywords and still finding your page. The positive about this is that the keyword they use is more than likely found somewhere on that page, even if it is buried deep in the text.
The underlying moral is that the more relevant the page, the more targeted the visitor and the more targeted a visitor, the more responsive they will prove to be.
Stand Out From The Opposition With Your USP

Identify your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, and package it so that your visitors can’t live without it. A Unique Selling Proposition is the one thing that makes your service stand out from the service of your competitors. It can be anything from cheaper prices to a personable service to a bunch of free giveaways.
The USP has to offer an advantage to your user. Better profit margins is not something that will attract people to purchase your products. Competitor analysis and market research are vital components to identifying your USP. You need to have intimate knowledge of your own product and service, as well as a similar level of knowledge of your competitors. Identify the stand out reason, or reasons, that make your website the best choice.

Once identified, the USP should become one of your biggest selling points. It should be identified and clearly defined early in the landing page copy and reiterated at an appropriate time later in the page. If you can include it as part of the tag line to your company or advertising campaign then that’s all the better.
Keep Your Visitor’s Attention By Beating The Fold

Beat the fold. In website terms, the fold is the bottom of your web page that is viewable without having to scroll. You should attempt to get all of the most important information across before the fold gets in the way. Another particularly nasty habit that modern surfers tend to adhere to is laziness. In many respects it’s our fault, as Webmasters, too.

We’ve created a virtual world where information is available at the click of the button. We’ve introduced and helped popularize features like video streaming that make information even easier and quicker to access. The result is that visitors take this speed and ease for granted. Clicking the scroll button may not seem a particularly testing action, but it is one that many of your visitors will avoid.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the shape of best practice web content writing. It is considered honest, reliable, and decent (as well as more effective) that you should summarize the contents of a page within the first paragraph. In fact, within the first short paragraph. Legitimately, and without going into finer details, we read and digest information on a computer screen much slower than from paper and to make allowances, landing page copy needs to be direct and use shorter sentence and paragraph structures.
Record Results And Test Changes
A good landing page is an effective one that converts visitors to customers or persuades them to complete your desired action. So, test your page. Get a good analytic package that includes masses of information and keep an eye on results. Make slight alterations rather than huge changes or blocks of changes - test the new page and then repeat the change and test process again until you get the best possible conversion rate.

Reduce Outgoing Links To An Essential Minimum

Don’t link out to too many pages and even try to minimize the number of navigation links you have above the fold. Links and navigational links are designed to stand out from the rest of your content and, you guessed it, surfers are easily distracted. Don’t go out of your way to move the navigation menu on landing pages, but if you’re designing a site from scratch try to keep those pesky and distracting elements down to a minimum (and that includes Flash pages).

Offering Incentives To Buy
If all else fails, offer an incentive. Give something away that offers true value. Offer a discount on larger orders or free shipping on all orders. Yet again, we go back to the irritating habits of surfers and consumers and one of the strongest of all those habits is looking for something for nothing, or something extra for no extra. Write an ebook, source re-brandable software, offer free shipping or three items for the price of two. Do something to grab your reader’s attention.

By Matt Jackson
Aside from berating surfers for being inconsiderate, lazy, freeloaders with no attention span Matt Jackson also partakes in web content writing and SEO copywriting with WebWiseWords.

You are currently browsing the 15 Digital Marketing weblog archives for January, 2008.