Directory submissions are still one of the most powerful and safest link building strategies in existence. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find quality directories to submit too as many directories continue to get penalized by Google as I outlined in my last post, the History of Paid Directories.

As a result, the goal of this three-part series is to focus on the power of directories for Search Engine Optimization, and more importantly, to teach any SEO enthusiast how to find quality directories (both paid and free) going forward. Here’s what you can expect from this three part series:

Post #1: As promised, this post will cover 3 major resources where you can find high quality directories.

Post #2: The second post will focus on link appraisal and analysis, and will provide a checklist of the top 7 most important criteria to look for when evaluating the power of specific directories.

Post #3: The last post will examine the 3 most important downfalls to avoid when making directory submissions and will also provide a short-list of the top directories to submit too.

OK. Let’s get down to the goods already. Below are the 3 major resources to use in order to find quality directories. I’ve also included some best practices and strategies that should be implemented in order to make the most out of these valuable resources.

1. Directory Critic 2. Digital Point Forums 3. DMOZ

Directory Critic is an excellent resource for SEO, and focuses on providing comprehensive lists of directories that are sortable according to a variety of criteria, including PR, type of directory (paid and/or free) and also an overall points rating. There’s also a myriad of advertisers and other services on the site as well for webmasters and directory owners to take advantage of. Notice how most of the banners have outdated PR!?! Thought so (sigh) such is the life of a directory.

The directory lists are broken down into new directories, general directories (paid, free, reciprocal, deep links and article) and niche directories. The majority of the new directories are start-ups, so it’s best to spend your time focusing in on the general and niche directory lists (ones linked above already sorted by PR). These lists are massive: Directory Critic currently has 3,085 free directories and 3,912 paid directories in its database!

It’s best to sort these lists by PR and start submitting from the top and work your way down. Most of these directories don’t generate much traffic, and even if they did, the purpose of submitting to a directory is not for traffic, it’s usually solely for SEO and to improve your rankings in the SERP’s.

Therefore, focus your efforts on securing links from the high PR directories, but don’t forget about some of the high quality niche directory lists. These niche lists cover the major topics (health, SEO, sports, shopping, adult, blogging, travel, etc.) as well as geographic regions (Australia, UK, Canada, US) so you should find at least a couple that apply to your niche.

Digital Point Forums is the largest webmasters forum and is an absolutely essential resource for everything related to SEO and internet marketing. Digital Point (DP) literally has sections on everything related to internet and search marketing. When it comes down to finding directories, there are two major categories where you can find a wide range of information and services related to directory submissions.

In the directories category, there is a wide range of thread topics, with the majority focusing on:

* Directory owners announcing their directories are open for submissions. * DP users offering a list of directories (usually free, but sometimes they ask for $). * DP users looking for help and advice on which directories to submit too.

Within this category there is also the solicitations sub-section, where you can find the majority of specific offers regarding directory owners announcing their free directories. There’s also the occasional paid directory owner offering free submissions to their high PR directory for a limited time.

In the services category, you can find threads where:

* DP Users are offering bulk manual submissions to free directories for a small fee (e.g. submit to 100 PR 5 directories for just $10) * Directory owners offering directory submissions on their network of directories.

These offers are constantly popping up on the services section, but you need to keep in mind that the quality of these free directory submitters is pretty skeptical in most cases. Just because they are submitting doesn’t guarantee approvals. So you need to either find someone who can guarantee a high acceptance rate, or only pay per approval. Either way, these categories provide plenty of opportunities to outsource bulk submission work and to find a lot of free, high quality directories to submit too.

DMOZ is still the king of kings when it comes to directories whether you like it or not. So you might as well accept it, and better yet, realize that you can take advantage of DMOZ using the DMOZ deep mining technique. Got to tip my hat to Debra Mastaler on this one, as once upon a time I also failed to realize the power of this directory as a resource until she showed me the way at SES Toronto just a few months back.

Using the DMOZ deep mining technique, you can find plenty of highly relevant, niche-focused directories to submit too by drilling down through specific categories, or by drilling down by region. It’s best to illustrate with a couple of examples:

E.g. #1 How to find niche specific directories

* Simply select the category which your niche falls under * Drill down to your specific niche (e.g. travel, gardening, dentistry, etc.) * Select the directories category, or occasionally the guides and directories category

E.g. #2 How to find regional business directories

* Select the regional category * Select which region you want and then drill down by country and even city * Then select the business directories category

This strategy may seem very simple, because it is! But, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. Keep in mind that these are all DMOZ listed directories, so they must have at least some quality. Either way, it’s one of the fastest ways to find highly specific niche directories by both category and region.

By utilizing these SEO Toronto strategies in unison, you can really cover a wide range of both general and niche specific directories. Whether you focus on the paid or free directories really depends on your time and budget. But before you run off and start submitting your site to every directory you can find, you need to be able to evaluate the power of specific directories. Only then will you know whether it’s worth the money, or in some cases time, to submit to these directories. Stay tuned for part 2 of this series, which will focus on link appraisal and is going to feature a checklist of the top 7 most important criteria to look for when evaluating the power of specific directories. Should be a good one!

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts don’t include referrer logs but may be subscribedd for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:

FTP Explorer: http://www.ftpx.com/ LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/ FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http://www.abacre.com/ala/ Referrer Soft http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/ Log Analyzer http://www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don’t send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user’s last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.

Overture’s http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly ‘computer game’ was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combination’s of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include,

Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.

Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.

Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.

More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

Guidebeam http://www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeam’s estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

These software’s are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.

It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it’s worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is crucial in search engine optimization.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

In this article we will describe common differencies between NetBannersOnline.com and Google AdWords technologies:

1. Google Adwords is Pay Per Click advertisement technology where you pay when someone clicks on your ad link. In some cases it’s good, but when you choose right keyword for you, you suddenly discover that you are only one of buyers of keyword and in order to get click to your link you should pay up to 70$ per click (for some keywords). With NetBannersOnline.com technology you only pay for owing keyword for full year and you, and only you will be shown as a result of search for your keyword.

2. In Google Adwords campaign you have to constantly compete with other companies and raise price for your keywords. Sometimes your ROI can be negative and you should be high professional to get positive results. With NetBannersOnline.com you just need to set url for keyword and get ready for getting traffic to your website.

3. Your advertisement budget can be different, depending on keywords and number of impressions that you choose. NetBannersOnline.com has fixed flat price for any keywords that you choose. Only traffic will vary, so only thing that you have to worry is to choose right keywords for your business.

4. When someone searches phrase that you own, NetBannersOnline.com already displays your website in IFRAME so it means that people already can see your website, without clicking on ad link (not many people like clicking on ad links).

5. Finally, Google Adwords works only with Google Search Engine, when NetBannersOnline.com works on All Major Search Engines, plus hundreeds of other partner websites with search features!

I’m using both technologies, cause I think they’re both good in their way, but you can decide which model is best for you.

You may think that search engine optimised websites are going to basically be websites that are poorly written, difficult to read, unnatural sounding and full of content that isn’t very useful. True, there are a lot of websites like that out there, but if you are looking to get your website search engine optimized, you do have a choice to make it totally readable and totally accessible to your customers. Here is what you have to keep in mind to get a search engine optimised website that is still going to be attractive to customers.

You can actually optimise your site or store online to different levels. You can decide on whether you want a total site optimisation or a partial one. Obviously, if you choose to optimise the whole site at the outset your results will naturally be better and you will get more visitors, on the other hand if you want to do it gradually then there is nothing wrong with that as well.

People naturally worry how their web site will be perceived when the optimisation changes are made, your first step in that case should be what we refer to as partial optimisation, this is the work which is done that visitors can’t see. The first port of call is changing the descriptions and titles which will have a big impact. The great thing here is that this means you don’t have to mess with the copy on your site.

This sometimes puts the fear into people that they will mess up their site, what you can do therefore is hire a search engine optimisation company who know how to do this kind of work, they will also make sure that your web site will be still be legible and that you will still be able to sell your products or services.

An SEO firm is going to be able to make everything on your website sound as natural as possible, but at the same time get visible results. Plus, an SEO firm is going to give you enough keywords to use which means that you will have variety in your text and readers won’t even know what hit them because it will still sound natural.

Companies also think incorrectly because their site is going to be optimised that it will be stuffed with keywords, and that all the quality content that was previously written will be discarded by the seo firm, that just isn’t the case.

You will definitely have stumbled across sites that are full of junk, and are lacking in quality information, however these sites have a very short shelf life as you can imagine. The reality is you want to a quality web site from the outset, and this means you must have a web site built that is designed to sell your product or service.

It is possible to get a search engine optimised website that is easy on your shoppers’ eyes. In fact, it is going to be essential to get one of these websites if you want to succeed. There is a lot of competition out there, so search engine optimisation services are absolutely crucial if you want to gain in the search engine rankings. Getting your website higher in the search engine rankings is going to really be important for business owners, and is something that you want to prioritize when starting a new business.

OnlineBannersNow is a Los Angeles based website marketing company, provides a full suite of online website marketing solutions directed to the internet community.

(PRWEB) April 21, 2004 — OnlineBannersNow has built a strong technical and sales force aimed at providing the best online marketing services at the most affordable costs in order to service a wider array of online clientele. Their experience goes back 10 years in the Email Marketing arena and another 6 years in the Search Engine Optimization field. OnlineBannersNow has most advanced by perfecting a quicker and easier Internet navigation system called Online Banners Now for those who no longer want to navigate using long complicated and hard to remember domain names, or hunt through thousands of search engine results to find what they are looking for.

With Online Banners Now they can put your website on the front of all the major search engines. You can also then choose your desired keywords or phrases you would like to appear under. They put your website on the top of all the major search engines and actually open your website in the results. Once registered all traffic derived from your words will now be delivered to your website. You will have access to a login area were you can track your visitors.

OnlineBannersNow.com is intuitive, familiar words and phrases, such as generic phrases and names or a short description of the websites goods or services. For example, if the searcher types “Bank” into the Search bar of any major search engine on an upgraded computer, they are instantly connected to the respective website.

Online Banners Now are used in conjunction with search engines to provide direct access to websites, giving users the ability to navigate from any point on the Internet directly to our client’s website, or even a specific location deep within their site.

To avoid many of the problems of the current domain name system, OnlineBannersNow.com manage the assignment of Internet Keywords with the goal of avoiding misdirection of users and misappropriation of trademarks and trade names.

According to a recent Forrester Research study, search engines are the top method for accessing customer sites followed by email, and SEO.

OnlineBannersNow is currently the largest provider of keywords in North America and is developing standards with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). To rapidly expand this technology, the Company has leveraged its existing customer relationships and is aggressively pursing new distribution relationships around the United States through ISPs, as well as providers of search, directory, e-commerce, portal and content services.

Client’s acceptance of the OnlineBannersNow product is almost intuitive. For anyone marketing on the Internet, keywords are foundational to online marketing strategies. Keywords are used in every websites meta-tags (these are hidden text descriptions) to notify search engines which words describe the site. There are also a number of sites that now sell keywords under what is known as a pay-per-click (ppc) model. Search Engine Optimization also focuses strictly on Keywords and meta-tags to increase a websites natural ranking on the major search engines.

OnlineBannersNow’s SEO service offers the guarantee that you will not find with most of the other SEO services online, a guarantee of first page placement. They will do everything in their power to place their clients website to be ranked in the natural results on the first page of those major search engines. Where other companies shy away from guarantees in order to stay safe, OnlineBannersNow will put their name on the line for their clients.

Are you looking for help promoting your site for top keywords? Using different research tools for effective keyword bidding is essential in advertiser programs such as Google AdSense and Yahoo tools. As you have probably heard over and over, keyword marketing is very importaint step in success of online business. you have to know exactly what is behind the high frequency of a specific search phrase When you search a software tool to find the most popular keywords for your website.

If you are just throwing up websites without incorporating professional niche keyword research into your site planning, content development and search engine optimization, you are truly taking a shot in the dark. Once your site structure is done it is time to create the content for the site, which is the crucial part and where the keyword optimization and keyword density comes into play.

Keyword marketing research is the factor that determines the success or failure of your niche site. While doing keyword optimization, we always recommended to do a thorough market research and competitive analysis to find top keywords used by search engine visitors to find products and services online and what search terms are targeted by your competitors who are doing well in online marketing.

Keyword ranking will help you keep afloat from your competitors, because through it, you’ll know what the public wants, what people are actually looking for, thus giving you ample time to come up with services and goods that these people want. At its simplest level, keyword research is about studying the phrases that work for your search engine audience.

OnlineBannersNow.com tools helps you identify search terms suitable for your business and you should use them to assist you in keyword research. It has set of unique technologies which allows you to see all needed information about keyword that you want to bid on. Plus, it has unique top placing technology which helps you to get on top of Google, Yahoo, MSN, plus dozens of search engines across the world. It’s business model differs from pay per click technologies and allows advertisers to get unique niche for their websites with unique ownership of keywords. If you’re a brick and mortar business that sells power tools, proper keyword research can be a tremendous help-even before you set up your online business.

In summary, a keyword ranking research is the heart of any search engine optimization task. An effective website relies on good set of keywords, and using the right tools to manipulate those terms.

Doing proper keyword optimization needs both time and skill, and the service doesn’t come cheap. In a nutshell, keyword marketing and ranking undoubtedly is a very important and also fascinating field of Internet marketing that unravels the magnitude of the Internet.