Directory Submission to Generate Online SEO Promotion

Links to your site from other sites drive additional traffic. But since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website ("link popularity") as an important indicator of relevance, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines. Google has a measure called PageRank that reflects the quantity and quality of incoming links. All links aren't all equal. Links from trusted, popular sites help your site rank higher than links from lower traffic sites.


Submit Your Site to Key Directories, since a link from a directory will help your ranking -- and get you traffic. A directory is not a search engine. Rather, it is a hierarchical listing of sites sorted according to category and subcategory. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), overseen by overworked volunteer editors. But if you don't get listed right away, don't be impatient and resubmit, or you'll go to the end of the queue. A link in this directory will help you a lot.

Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) is another important directory. Real humans read submission, so be careful to follow the instruction given. Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don't have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Yahoo! Directory Submit (ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/) requires a $299 annual recurring fee to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days. Other paid business directories that might help are About.com and Business.com.

The Trick to Generating SEO Driven Traffic

The trick to generating SEO driven traffic and going viral is to make sure people can find you. It's easy on one hand but hard in the fact it will take you some time at first to set it up. But the payoff is well worth it.


1. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go farther. If you find the search engines aren't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.


2. Create a Site Map. A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. You can use a free tools, XML-Sitemaps.com (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/xml-sitemaps.htm) to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your webpages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website. Then submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (formerly MSN), following instructions on their sites. By the way,  Google Webmaster Central (www.google.com/webmasters/) has lots of tools to help you get ranked higher. Be sure to set up a free account and explore what they have to offer.


3. Develop Webpages Focused on Each Your Target Keywords. SEO specialists no longer recommend using external doorway or gateway pages, since nearly duplicate webpages might get you penalized. Rather, develop several webpages on your site, each of which is focused on a target keyword or keyphrase for which you would like a high ranking. Let's say you sell teddy bears. Use Google Insights for Search (www.google.com/insights/search/) or the free keyword suggestion tool on Wordtracker (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/wordtracker.htm) to find the related keywords people search on. In this case: write a separate webpage featuring the keyword "teddy bear," "teddy bears," "vermont teddy bears," "vermont bears," "the teddy bears," teddy bears picnic," "teddy bears pictures," etc. You'll write a completely different article on each topic. You can't fully optimize all the webpages in your site, but for each of these focused-content webpages, spend lots of time tweaking to improve its ranking.


4. Fine-tune with Careful Search Engine Optimization. Now fine-tune your focused-content pages and perhaps your home page, by making a series of minor adjustments to help them rank higher. Software such as WebPosition (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/webposition.htm) allows you to check your current ranking and compare your webpages against your top keyword competitors. I use it regularly. WebPosition's Page Critic tool provides analysis of a search engine's preferred statistics for each part of your webpage, with specific recommendations of what minor changes to make. The best set of SEO tools is Bruce Clay's SEOToolSet (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/clay_seotoolset.htm). If you want more detailed information, consider purchasing my inexpensive book Dr. Ande's SEO Tips for Improved ROI (www.setipsforsmallbusiness.com/SEO-ROI.html). You can get a free SEO Tutorial on my site and even more in our (http://www.seotipsforsmallbusiness.com/Freebies.html ).


5. Promote Your Local Business on the Internet. These days many people search for local businesses on the Internet. To make sure they find you, include on every page of your website the street address, zip code, phone number, and the five or 10 other local community place names your business serves. If you can, include place names in the title tag, too. When you seek links to your site, you should request links from local businesses with place names in the communities you serve and complementary businesses in your industry nationwide.

Also create a free listing for your local business on Google Maps Local Business Center (www.google.com/local/add) and Yahoo! Local (listings.local.yahoo.com). That way your business can show up on a map when people do a local search.


6. Promote Your Video, Images, and Audio Content. Google's "universal search" displays not only webpage content, but also often displays near the top of the page relevant listings for images, videos, local businesses, and audio clips.  Therefore, consider creating such content appropriate to your business and then optimizing it so it can be ranked high enough to help you. For example, if you were to get a top-ranking, informative video on YouTube (www.youtube.com) that mentions your site, it could drive a lot of traffic to your site. For more information, search on "optimizing images" or "optimizing videos."

6 Simple Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important -- and inexpensive -- strategy is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content of your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about. This approach is called "search engine optimization," abbreviated as SEO.

1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page -- rich in keywords you want people to find you with -- using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing Checklist -- 37  Ways to Promote Your Website</TITLE>. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.


2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. Don't include keywords that don't appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links.">
The maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag.

Next, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those into the keywords META tag. It's no longer used much for ranking, but I'm leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two points, you're well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there's more that will help your ranking....


3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)


4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it.


5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/) and gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search (see #12 below).


6. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as blue-widget.htm -- another clue for the search engine.

7. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and eCommerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go any further. If you find the search engines are't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.

3 Tips to Easy Business SEO promotion

Many local businesses struggle to find ways to promote themselves, get links, rank in search engines, and ultimately drive traffic to their websites. Most small businesses also have limited budgets making the task more difficult. For those businesses here are some ways you can promote your business online for free and generate some SEO traffic organically.

1. Email Signatures: Be sure to add your business URL to all of your outgoing email. Want to catch the reader's attention? Try adding your mission statement, or a catchy phrase to help people understand what you do. Change the statement a several times a year so people notice it again.
2. Syndicate Your Content and Ideas: Take advantage of article distribution Services like EZineArticles, ISnare, and IdeaMarketers to spread your message and approach. Use them to bring leads to your site by offering things like free eBooks or PDF’s that they can download after entering their contact information.
   
   These create link backs to you because you will include your business URL in your resource box. When you do this try and be just as creative. Don't just point them to the first page of your website. You can either create specific landing pages to send them too based on the company you post the article with or by topic (keep in mind this can become a lot of landing pages unless you write about one or two categories or topics).
3. Get listed: This is one of the most basic methods of business promotion, both on and offline. List yourself in as many business directories as you can; yellow pages, and local business Websites as you can find. Many of these will list your company for free, though some might require you to pay a small fee.
   
   This type of promotion is well worth the time and investment, as most people consult these publications when looking for a designer, plumber, electrician etc. You see the point.

Getting your business name recognized in appropriate circles is one of the biggest hurdles a fledgling company is going to face, but with a little fore-thought and some shameless self-promotion it's not as hard to get noticed as you may think.

How Article Writing Improves Your SEO and Small Business Marketing

Writing articles on topics related to your business expertise is an excellent business promotion technique. Well-written articles can provide free advertising and build positive word-of-mouth. If you're a realtor, for instance, you could write a piece on preparing your home to be shown. If you're a Web site designer, you might write a piece about assessing Web site usability. The more specific your topic, the better. Write a short biographical note, or "blurb" about you and your business to go with the article. Then send it out!

Where? As the goal is to promote your business, ideally you'd like it to appear in a publication that your target audience will be reading. Realistically, you may have to send it to a publication that accepts unsolicited work from unknown authors. Magazines generally have a long lead time, so I would focus my first efforts on the 'Net. There are an astronomical number of eZines and sites with newsletters that are hungry for content.

One place to look for eZines to send articles to is eZine Net Top 20 Directories. eZines also provide excellent advertising value; the trick is to find the right eZine for your target audience. Freelance writing sites also provide a great deal of information on all kinds of publications that might publish your efforts. Make your research easier by starting with a great site that provides all kinds of lists and information on markets such as About Freelance Writers, or FreelanceWriting.com.

Newspapers are also excellent places to place your business promotion article, as they too have a much shorter lead-time than magazines, and are always looking for material. Try contacting the Business editor of your local paper and pitching your article. If this approach fails, you might be able to get your piece into the paper by sending it in as a letter to the Editorial section.

Search Engine Optimization – Title and Meta Tags

Now that you have a better idea how to pick your keywords for your website/blog pages it’s time to take a look at Meta tags and how you can use them to achieve higher rankings in search engines.

Traditionally, Title and Meta HTML tags – parts of your websites’ underlying source code– have been centerpieces of any successful search engine optimization campaign. In the early days of the search engines, a top ranking often could be secured by simply building the right Title and Meta tags for your website or blog. Today, well-optimized Title tags remain among the most important search engine optimization factors, while the value of Description and, particularly, Keywords Meta tags has declined. Still, because most small and/or niche search engines and Web directories continue to incorporate all three elements into their indexation and ranking procedures, you should add carefully-optimized Title and Meta tags to your website.

Now while keyword meta tags and description are overlooked today, due to the Google SEO rage of the past few years, I’m going to explain why ideally, all of your site’s main pages should be equipped with individual Title and Meta tags that reflect the products and services offered on each of the pages, and why you want to put in the description and still use those keyword meta tags. You see, doing so allows you to aim for a top search engine ranking for each individual page, based on the keywords and phrases specific to each page.

Let me break it down for you.

continued...

Keyword Density for SEO

Keyword Density is the percentage of keywords compared to the rest of the text in your Web page. This metric is important because it gives you a tool to compare a Web page or site to that of similar pages with higher rankings. You can see how your use of keywords compares to theirs.
If you see a comparable keyword density between sites, chances are their higher ranking is due to inbound links and/or inherited page rank. If their keyword density is higher than yours, there’s a good chance you can increase your ranking with some careful keyword placement for organic search optimization.
Use one of the following free keyword cloud tools to check your site’s actual keyword density:


Visual Results
Use font size and bold-face to get a quick visual of what words have the highest density on the pages you search (without the actual statistics).

Keyword Cloud from webconfs
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

Keyword Density Checker from iwebtool
http://www.iwebtool.com/keyword_density


Statistical results
These tools give you actual number of occurrences, percentages of density and other key metrics by keyword.

Keyword Density Tool from SEO Tools™
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Keyword Density from Link Vendor
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/keyword-density.html


Compare two sites
Use this tool to see how your site compares to another.

Keyword Density Analyzer from KeywordDensity.com
http://www.keyworddensity.com/
What do you do with the information once you have it?

Once you get a good understanding of what keywords are strongest on your site. You might be surprised that your organic content is pointing search engines in a direction you didn’t expect.

1.       Evaluate that and decide if you need to modify your copy and tags/titles, or if it’s something you should use to your advantage and build upon.

2.       Take a new look for competition. Try searches on the top keywords in the major search engines and see who shows up.

Take a look at their sites and see if they truly are competition. Review their offers to see how they compare to yours. Also be sure to read the search engine results set for their site compared to yours…whose is more compelling? How can you change your copy to better grab the potential customer’s attention if your results were to come up side-by-side

3.       Compare keyword density with your known top competitors. This might give you an idea who’s more likely to come out on top in the major search engines (of course, keyword density is only one factor in the mix – don’t forget that incoming links, overall relevancy, etc., also determine page rank).

Use the results to help prioritize the copy you need to tweak in the future, or maybe set your goals to build some new content pages that will make you a stronger competitor in those areas.

4.       Target online directories where you can submit your site and increase incoming links. To ensure you get approved for inclusion, have a blurb that clearly ties your site to that directory.

Until Next Time

Good Luck & Good Business

reprinted with permission