Directory Submission Guide

As discussed earlier directory submission plays a very important role in search engine optimization of a site. Question arises how can we categorize them and which one are the best to be approached. Here I would try to differentiate directories .

1. Human maintained - These are basic directories made on traditional pattern edited by human editors .These directories have very slow process of approval but these are well maintained and properly categorized. As these directories have strict submission rules, the quality is really very good. Though human maintenance is very laborious and time consuming but Dmoz , Yahoo and many other directories are there .While planning to optimize your site you cant ignore the importance of these directories.

2. User categorized - These are same as human edited but here the site owner decides which category he wants his site to be listed. This reduces the director editor’s work
These directories also give satisfactory results.

3. User classified- Sites are classified on keywords, the site owner has to submit the meta tags and keywords while submitting site. Most of these directories are having automated process so low and easy maintenance. While submitting site to this type of directories you should choose most popular keywords because if you use some uncommon combination would result in less visitor reaching your site. Best known example for these types of directories is Exactseek.


Criteria for selecting directories -

1. Analyze on your own by making searches in directory using different keywords and if the results are relevant as per your search that means directory is properly categorized.
2. Inbound Traffic – The Alexa index is the most popular for traffic measure. You just need to download and install Alexa toolbar and you can select the directories getting real traffic. Don’t merely go for high ranking but prefer directories having heavy traffic measure. It can be compiled this way higher the inbound result to directory more would be outbound links.
3. Search engine scanning – Check whether the directory is indexed or not .You can do this by just putting the url of directory in google’s search box. The directory should be cached and with no supplement result pages.
4. Site’s ranking - You need to check out your sites location in the particular category. The listing should be in first 30-40 sites , if listed on 4 or 5 th page you cant expect visitors to go down so many pages and look for your link.
5. Robots - Make sure that the directory you are submitting link to should not have robot disallowed.
6. Loading time – The page loading should be fast as slow loading pages divert the visitors.
7. Free submission – Always go for free directory submissions, and never go for paid and reciprocal link exchanging directories.

Every directory provides with guidelines, follow them properly .Target mostly for free and search engine friendly directories.

Directory Submission: Importance in Seo and Traffic building

In earlier days mostly user turned to directories for making web searches. Yahoo was basically a directory, grew to be a strong guide for others. The success of yahoo motivated a lot of people to start directories. They hired human editors for categorizing and maintaining directories.
But situation has changed now; search engines are used more than directories. This has resulted in closing down of few directories and few of them trying to make their position in this search engines culture.
In spite of all this why every next day we hear of new directories launch? I would try to analyze how these directories are helping us in seo and traffic building.

What’s the need to submit site to directory?
There are two major reasons for this firstly targeted traffic and secondly link popularity.

Targeted traffic- Even though directories are not the primary source for traffic but they provide with targeted traffic. You know sometimes search results don’t give the required results as per your requirement. So you may have a lot of visitors but not potential customers. We can say all the visitors are not potential consumers for your products; as a result low conversion rates. Conversion rate is what we want than just mere visitors.
Whereas the visitors coming through directories are mostly the potential customers as they exactly know what they are looking for. Directories being manually maintained guarantees conversion from visitors by providing them the exact results as per their requirements. Mostly directories have a proper tree categorization making it easier to browse through for visitors.

Link Popularity-Mostly directories are maintained by human editors, whereas search engines follow mechanical algorithms. Nowadays these directories with billions of pages are used as database by major search engines.
The search engines crawlers or boots consider links as a vote for site, more the links –more votes. However links from relevant pages gives more benefit than from non relevant. When Google added link popularity to its algorithm the search result came out more accurate as compared to earlier. And other search engines have also started doing same.

Hence we can say directory submission plays a vital role in traffic building.

Importance of sitemap in promotion of website

Site maps are the pages that contain links to all of the pages on a site. They provide the reader and the crawler one location to access whole site. Search engine spiders find it hard to follow links with java script like mouse over so it’s advisable to keep your links in text. The text links can have keywords rich text but meaningful related to the page content. In case you have a big site I mean number of pages is more you should categorize the links or increase site map pages. Search engines crawls site through links on sites, you just need to submit your website url with them.They will automatically search link by link from your site map. Adding google’s sitemap protocol into CMS automatically sends notification changes to Google regarding any updation made to sitemap and Google uses updated sitemap for indexing.
Hierarchal format is most commonly used sitemap format because it’s simple and easy to read for crawlers. You can take help from sitemap.org; XML-Sitemap.com is an online source available for generating sitemaps. You just need to input your site url it automatically generates xml file for sitemap.Make sure you use text links and If you create a graphic site map, try to make the graphic as small and fast-loading as you can. To make it compact, use few colors and save it as a GIF file.

Navigation - where are we heading to?

Navigation into a site should be easy that is the visitor should be able to navigate through your site easily. You may find it awkward how can navigation affect visitors but if the visitor is unable to browse to other pages from your landing page would leave your site before even going through your products as a result you may lose a potential customer. To increase conversion rate you have to keep in mind user ,keep navigation simple and there should be link to every page from home page .And there should be link to home page from every page.

Navigation is just not for users but even crawlers give importance to navigation. If they are unable to find proper navigation through your site, they will move away without crawling through your inner pages. Your site homepage is a book and the navigations are the chapters, so make sure you have proper way to all the chapters of your book. I hope you not only get good traffic but good conversion rate too.

Using keywords wisely

After finalizing keywords we need to use these keywords in such a way that we get full benefit from search engines. By including main keyword make a title and description for your site. The keyword should be used just once, there shouldnt repeat keywords in title and description if you are repetitive would result in repelling search engines. The next step is to optimize keyword by using it in our site content. It may be 10% of total word count of the whole site page content. Excessive use of keyword into site content would repel search engines. You can implement alt tags to pictures on your site.

The next step is getting meta tags for this we have online tools those can be utilized. Place keywords title descriptions and meta tags in html head tag of the site.Now you are done with on page in a way you can say optimization started well.

Importance of keywords and how to get best leywords

Getting more traffic from different search engines affects a lot in getting more business from website. To start with we have to understand the functioning of search engines, how the algorithms work and locate sites. The crawlers or the bots look for a particular keyword that has been entered by the user. So, the keyword is playing most important role. Keywords are the strings of words that people put in to search box for particular thing. We need to be very careful while deciding keywords for site, taking in consideration targeted people what people are looking for .There are many tools available online for searching keywords, take into consideration other medias like news paper, magazines television advertisements ,as they leave a great impact on common mans life.This gives you wider range of keywords, hence increase in your reach to a broader audience. When we are done with collection of keywords, we need to finalize keywords to be used on site. We need to analyze keywords by taking in consideration competition and search counts, search count should be more and competitors should be less. For doing these analysis we have handful of online tools available with us.

What to do with a website made for your business

Now you know for getting more business, you need a website.What to do with the website to get more buisness ? You need to promote your site. So, you can go for search engine optimizations as this is very efficient way of promoting websites in search engines. Make sure to minimize use of flash and frames as search engine robots are unable to read things in frames and flash. It reduces your scopes of getting up in search engine result pages. Cross check your site for any broken links and check html validator. Sitemap is a must thing for a site because it shows the bots the whole path to go through your site.

Now start optimizing your site for search engines it starts form on page optimization and then comes off page optimization. On page comprises of implementing title ,description, keywords and meta tags.Off page includes link building, directory submission, article syndication, blogging , rss feeds etc.So start up with optimization.

Making email marketing more benficial

E-mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing .People use email marketing for commercial purpose and business relationships. The primary purpose for commercial mail marketing is to commercial advertisement or promotion of a product or service. But the commercial purpose is correspondence initiated by an individual, including requests for information, responses to questionnaires or surveys, responses to s contests, or offline contact.

Whenever planning email marketing for your product or services we need to follow some guidelines. So as recipients doesn’t delete them considering them as a junk mails. We want our message to reach the targeted audience without being considered a spammer. By following few guidelines we can improve impact of our mail marketing campaign.

Acknowledgement: Every email id included in mailing list should be given acknowledgement, telling him about his mail ids inclusion in list and giving him option to get removed from the list .In a way it gives you a mutual consent from the person that he is willing to get your messages.

Subject lines : It should be kept relevant short and not having any special signs like exclamatory signs, dollar signs, inverted comas etc .Mostly words free, guaranteed should be avoided ,as mostly people delete mails with these words.

Sender Information: The information regarding the sender should be proper; sender id should either be name of a specific person or the name of your organization. The post mailing address must be given below the mail.

Text: The mail messages text should be optimized because people don’t have time to go through long mails. So the content should be put in small text blocks and use bullets and bold to highlight the main headings or you can even hyper links. While using buttons or pictures, for more information or buy now, make sure they are clickable.

Html: Different people use different email applications like Eudora, Microsoft outlook, so html mail formats are proven more friendly with all the email applications as compared to the complicated ones.

Images: Never use large images as they take time in downloading than smaller images. Some email applications are set up with images disabled, because of security reasons. So, make sure use of images should be kept minimal.

Flash and Videos: Using flash and videos and audios embedded form is good to make your mail more informative, but we need to take care about the targeted customers.

Sending Frequency: Planning a mail marketing campaign, determine a schedule and follow it strictly. It should be once a day, a week or once a month. The more consistent you are with your schedule the more reorganization in your customers.

Testing: There should be option for people to give feedbacks regarding your mails, it helps in overcoming flaws and improving your quality.

Technical aspects: To make sure that your mail is not considered as spam, email should be sent with proper configuration.

Increasing lists: Growing mailing list is also important but should be done ethically through your customers with their consent.

By following these few guidelines we can make mail marketing very effective and enjoy the benefits.