Why should you pay for a directory submission service

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Why should you pay for a directory submission service?

Nearly every knowledgeable internet business owner and webmaster on the planet knows that in order to improve their rankings in the major search engines, they need one thing: links, and lots of them. Link building services abound online today, whether it’s a directory submission service, a blog posting service or forum posting service; website owners are gobbling up these link building services like a stray dog devours leftovers and scraps that are found in the back alley.

Some website owners, in order to save a few dollars, have taken it upon themselves to perform these link building strategies without the help of the knowledgeable experts; thinking to themselves:

"Why should I pay for a directory submission service when I can do it myself for free?"

In all honesty, you can perform your own link building services, and you don't have to hire a directory submission service for your website’s link building. However, do you really know what you’re getting yourself into?
Even though directory submission services are typically low-cost and comparatively affordable when considering other website promotion and optimization strategies; there’s good reasoning behind hiring a professional directory submitter over performing this link building service yourself.

Directory Submissions are time consuming

The biggest downfall of performing your own directory submissions is that they are excessively time consuming for the novice directory submitter. Whilst a professional directory submitter can perform this link building service quickly because they have done it thousands of time before and have the proper tools to perform directory submissions quickly; the average Joe or Jane website owner will eat up three minutes or more per submission, easily. A professional directory submission service may be able to submit to 100 directories in just over an hour while somebody who is not familiar with the directory submission process will take, with a conservative estimate, over four hours to perform the same 100 directory submissions.

In order to be effective, directory submissions need to be submitted correctly

Novice directory submitters often times fail to adhere to the written and even unwritten guidelines of website directory submissions; which can lead to a wasted effort on your part because if you don’t submit your website to directories in a way that is generally viewed as acceptable by directory owners, regardless of whether or not there are any submission guidelines posted, you will inevitably suffer from a low acceptance rate from the directories.

For instance, a directory submission service understands how to properly form the website’s title and how many words are generally acceptable, how to word the description for better acceptance and which categories to submit to in order to receive the highest acceptance rate while working to get the client the best placement for SEO purposes. A novice directory submitter does not understand these subtle guidelines and will ultimately suffer because of it if they try to submit to directories on their own.

Other pitfalls of 'self-submission' to online directories

If you choose to perform directory submissions yourself to save the minimal amounts required by a directory submission service, there are other things that you will need to be aware of.

For instance, do you have the ability to determine whether a directory is "SEO friendly" and will help your website’s rankings in the search engines? A professional directory submitter can usually pinpoint a worthless directory right away. In fact, many directory submission services have pre-compiled lists of search engine friendly directories that they use on a daily basis so that their clients can rest assured that each and every submission takes place to a directory that will provide SEO benefit.

Do you have the ability to use multiple proxy servers to "mask" your identity during directory submissions? If you’re doing a large number of submissions, any professional directory submitter will tell you that using a proxy server during the submission process is absolutely necessary. There are many directories online that are run by the same company, and during the submission process, your IP address is tracked; if you happen to get flagged because of too many submissions, you’ll end up with a time-consuming hardship on your hands trying to weed out the directories that are prohibiting you from submitting to them.

Now this is not, by any means, an exhaustive list of reasons why you should use a directory submission service for your website’s promotion instead of doing it yourself. While initially it might seem like a good idea to perform directory submissions on your own, after you've spent a few hours on it and have done only a handful of submissions; you’ll better understand how much of a bargain you are getting when you hire a directory submission service for this website link building strategy.

What it all boils down to is this: a directory submission service is offered by professionals who understand how to perform this link building method efficiently and effectively. Unless you've got a lot of time on your hands, this link building strategy is much better when left to the professionals.

How to Choose Keywords for Your Website

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Having a well-built and up to date web page and promoting it so that many thousand of people can see the products and services you are selling is the key behind earning a lot of money from doing business online. However, you must not stop at building the site and updating it. People must be able to see it if you want to increase the number of potential customers and you can only do so by optimizing your web page for search engines. Most people use popular search engines when looking for certain products and services and that is why having a site optimized for these search engines is very important. Having the correct keywords and keyword density is one of the most important things when considering creating a web site to support your business. Actually, you should have in mind the list of keywords you want to add to your site before you even start creating it. Search engines offer a series of search engine optimization services and this should be a good starting point. If you are planning an English web site, you can look at websites such as wordtracker.com or inventory.overture.com. Therefore, the first logical step is to make out a list of keywords that should appear on your webpage. Next, try to find out what keywords your competitors are using, as you can find some more relevant information this way.

You can use two methods: optimizing your website for a small number of very popular keywords, or very many less popular keywords. You will see that in practice these methods are very well combined many times. There is a downside to using keywords as a main visitor's attraction method: all sites uses it and it is harder for a newly developed webpage to get even close to the rankings of large, old sites that use similar keywords. One of the best ways to increase traffic to your site is to attract targeted visitors when thinking your search engine optimization methods. Remember, targeted visitors are those people that come to your site and who are searching for the products you are selling and are willing to buy those products or services. It is the number of targeted visitors that come to your site that should interest you and not the total amount of traffic. From the list of keywords, that you have gathered you must choose the core keywords for which you will optimize your web page. You will not be the only one using those keywords on your site, thus the competition for the selected keywords is very high. In order to see you site fits in once launched, you must have an idea about exactly how competitive your web page is. You can do this by reviewing a set of data for the first ten results displayed by the search engine when using the selected keywords. Among the data you should look at is the average Page Rank of each of the displayed results, the average number of links that guides people to these web pages. Other elements you should look at are the approximate number of pages on the Internet that contain the selected keywords (the total number of results displayed by the search engine) and the number of pages on the Internet that contain exact matches to the keyword phrase. By having all these numbers in mind, you can make an idea about your competition on those keywords and how easy or how hard it will be for you to get a top ranking for your web page.

Now that you have gathered enough information to make a thorough examination of the competition rate for all of your keyword phrases, you can go on to include a series of key phrases with moderate popularity but having an acceptable competition rate, which you can use to further promote and optimize your site.

Because the services provided by search engines about keywords and keywords statistics, do not be surprised if at first you will not be able to obtain the most efficient list of keywords from the beginning. After you have launched your web page, you can further analyze traffic and keywords statistics to finely tune your site. Only after launching your site you will be able to see the search engine's rating of your site for particular phrases and you will also have the number of visits to your site for these phrases. Now you can see what key phrases are attracting people that use search engines to your site and what keywords do not work as efficient. If you notice that certain key phrases are not efficient in attracting traffic to your page, you can take measure in that direction: you can edit them, or you can take then out altogether. You may also discover that a keyword that you did not take into consideration very much at the beginning is bringing you more targeted visitors than one that you considered important and you can optimize your web site accordingly. If you know that keywords are efficient in bringing you targeted traffic, you can increase their frequency throughout your web page or even create new pages around those keywords and phrases. The techniques of search engine optimization are changing all the time and what had proven highly efficient some time ago may not be appropriate in the future. Therefore, that is why you will need to changes the keywords in time if you see that the traffic numbers are not satisfactory anymore. Nothing is built forever and you will constantly need to update both your web page and your SEO methods to been in touch with the current developments.

Also, remember that your main page attracts up to 50% of all the search traffic, and because it has the highest visibility in search engines, optimizing it for search engines and for the most popular queries related to your business field should be a top priority.

There are also a lot of tools out there that can help you to research your keywords. Typing "SEO Tools" in any search engine will return huge amount of useful SEO tools. There are also tools for link building, page research, marketing effectiveness, etc

How a Search Engine Works

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The best place to begin before optimizing your site is to try and understand a little of how a search engine spider works. At a very basic level, it will trawl through your page, and give it ‘points’ for certain things. Some it places more importance on than others, but put simply, the more of these things that you have, the more points you get and the higher your rating will be.

Before going into more detail on these areas, something you’ll need to take into consideration is frames. Web developers are generally split into two camps on this issue, and it’s reasonably safe to say that most people either love them or hate them. Frames undoubtedly do have their advantages, but if you’re trying to build a site that’s optimized for spiders, then they can only cause trouble.

If you make a site without frames, you allow the search engines to reference your page quickly and easily. But if you do decide to build inside a frameset, then you’ll have to make use of the "noframes" tag. However, for the sake of this tutorial lets assume that you’ve chosen to forgo frames.

Onto the Important Stuff: Meta Tags and More

By now, just about everyone is aware of the tags that are available to developers, so it’s helpful to get these right from the beginning. Tedious as it may sound, always write individual meta code for each page of your site, as that way it has a greater chance of coming up through a search. By trying to condense the whole content of your site into a few keywords for one page, you’re ruining your chances.

You have several tags to choose from: "meta name =" ”keywords”" and "meta name =" “description”" being the most important two. Always put your most important words and phrases at the front. As a rule, you should also keep the tags short and sweet. A spider will attach more importance to five words than to fifty, so make those five words count. Pick out words that you think people will be searching for to get to your site. You don’t need to make these bold or all caps, the formatting inside tags has no real relevance to the spiders.

Once you’ve picked your keywords and phrases for a page, you’ll want to ensure that they appear as often as possible within the text. Repetition of the words re-enforces their relevance to a search engine, so if your site is dedicated to anime, put “anime” in the copy as often as you can without it losing clarity.

There are plenty of ways to include your keywords multiple times on a page. Things like drop-down menus use them, as do breadcrumb trails. If your site design incorporates them, all to the good.

It’s also worth noting that a search engine will rate a keyword higher than normal if it is formatted in some way. As an example, lets the anime page again. You’d like a title in the main text to say ‘Anime Characters’. Putting the phrase into an tag, and link it either to a relevant page or itself. Now, use JavaScript to keep the cursor to a default on rollover. Instead of a hand indicating a link, the user will see a normal cursor. Should they happen to click on the text, the link will work for them.

You can add titles to links too, similar to an "alt" tag. They operate in a very similar way to the displaying a hover caption when the link is rolled over. Duplicate your keywords in here to boost the number of times it appears in your page. This isn’t ideal though, as it does tend to interfere with the layout of the screen. If you don’t mind the caption though, it’s another possibility for you to use.

In addition to all of this, spiders will take note of all the outbound links on the page, and check out where they go. If the destination page is also packed full of similar keywords and phrases, then the link rates even higher. This is another reason why it’s worthwhile tailoring each page individually.

It’s not just outbound links either, search engines will also see how many external sites link to your own. Generally, the more the better, and again, if the link is from a source with similar keywords and a good rating, your own standing is increased.

Another thing to remember is that a search engine places higher importance on the start of the page’s code than on the end. So ideally, you want all your newly optimized text with keywords to come right under the "body" tag. But we all know that if you’re building a site, there’s generally a lot of code written before you ever get to the main content. So how can you get round this?

If you remove all your JavaScript (providing you have any of course) to an external .js file and link to it, that will save you a lot of space to bump up the important pieces of text.

You can also employ layers to shift the order of the code round a little without screwing up your design. By dividing the page up into layers, you can place layers with keywords right up the top and layers with less important design elements underneath, whilst still employing things like tables on the main page.

Of course this isn’t always ideal. Sometimes your design won’t allow you to work this way. But as with all of the points given above, you need to reach a compromise between the looks of the site and getting it rated with engines. Hopefully though, you should now have an even better idea of how to make your site top of Google.