SEO Tips & Information

If you want your website to do well in SERPs, you need to build lots of backlinks to your website. One simple SEO tip for building links is to submit your site details to web directories. Web directories are a bit like online versions of a telephone book. Hundreds or thousands of sites are listed together with a short description of the website and a link to the site. Unlike most other types of website, directories actually WANT to give out links. There are thousands of directories available, so with a bit of persistence - either using manual submission or using a directory submission tool - you can build up hundreds of backlinks.

SEO isn’t as simple as submitting your site to thousands of directories though. The vast majority of directories will only give you a weak backlink and in a lot of cases, the web page your link appears on may be completely ignored by search engines like Google.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, Google has realised that people were building huge numbers of links through directory submission and has devalued the worth of directory links. It’s quite common to find directories that have a decent homepage PageRank of 3 or more but all their inner pages have a PR of N/A. A PageRank of N/A means that the links on the inner pages are pretty much worthless. This doesn’t mean though that all directory links are bad. If you have your site in Google Webmasters and Google shows the link from the directory in the External Links section, it means you get some benefit from the link even if it’s small. I know that for some of my sites in Google Webmasters shows a few hundred directory backlinks.

Here are 4 directory submission tips:

What sort of directories should you submit to?

Well, the usual advice is to submit to directories with high PR. However, for the reasons given above, just because a directory has a homepage PR of 4 or 5 doesn’t mean that the inner pages have any link juice to pass on.

Unless the directory is old and well-established, e.g. DMOZ or BOTW, you can’t be sure the homepage PR will stick for very long anyway. In some cases directories are put on dropped or recycled domains and usually, at the next PR update, the PR drops off.

Also, just because a directory is new, or has low PR today, doesn’t mean its PR won’t increase in the future. When people set up a new directory they often start out allowing free submissions or submission that don’t require a reciprocal link. So if a new directory appears make a submission before the directory goes paid or starts needing a reciprocal link before you get listed.

So my recommendation is that since directory submission is so easy, especially if you use a semi-automatic directory submitter, submit to as many as you can - new or old, high PR or low PR.

Do you get a benefit from being listed in major directories like BOTW?

I have to say, in my experience the answer is no. I never saw any benefit from being listed in BOTW - either in ranking in SERPs or in traffic. I also never saw any decrease in rank or traffic from cancelling my listing in BOTW. I did save a few dollars though by cancelling my subscription.

Should you pay for submission?

Maybe, but not much. If you do pay for submission, make sure the page your site gets linked from will have a decent PR. You might pay for submission if you think the directory will give you lots of traffic even if the PR is N/A but you’ll never be able to tell how much traffic you’re going to get before you pay. In the past couple of years, I’ve received no more than a handful of referrals from directories. Remember also, that even if the page your link is on has a PR today, Google might come along and drop it to N/A in the next few months.

Should you give a directory a reciprocal link?

No. Reciprocal links are a bit devalued anyway. The whole idea of directory submission (and SEO) is to get a one way link to your website. Giving a link in return defeats the purpose of doing directory submission.

For more info on directory submission and link-building, read:

• Directory Submitter Software Tools: Can they harm your site?
• Using Press Releases to Build Links
• Link-building using DoFollow Blogs

Link-building

A simple SEO tip for building links to your blog posts is to enable pinging in the Wordpress Admin pages.

Pinging the major search engines and blog directories notifies them that you’ve made a new post so they should come and index it double-quick. On this blog, a new post normally appears in the Google search results within 5 minutes of being published.

The bigger benefit of pinging though is that there are a loads of automatic blogs that pick up new posts and link to them. It’s usual that within a few hours each new post on this blog picks up 3 or 4 links from other blogs as a result of pinging. These links aren’t of the highest quality but never turn down the opportunity for an easy link.

To enable pinging, you need to tell Wordpress which pinging services to use when a new blog post is published. To do this:-

1. Log into your blog as the admin.
2. Click on the Settings link over on the right, near the top of the page.
3. Click on the Writing link on the left.
4. Paste the links to pinging sites in the Update Services field at the bottom of the page.
5. Press the Save Changes button.

There are hundreds of pinging services you can use, but there are only a few major ones worth bothering with. Here’s the list I use.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

If you want to easily find out when someone links to your posts, enable trackbacks when you write a post. When another Wordpress blog links to you, you’ll then get a comment on the post being linked to in the form of a trackback. Askimet will pick these trackbacks up as spam so you can easily delete them before they get displayed as comments, but it’s a quick and easy way of knowing who’s linking to you.

For more Wordpress SEO Tips read Improving Wordpress blogpost titles and How to use the All-In-One SEO Pack.

Link-building, Wordpress SEO Tips

So often I’ve read on SEO forums that using software to aid submitting your site to directories will either:-

1. Cause the directory owners to ban you.
2. Cause Google to ban you.
3. Just plain kill your site.

I’ve never subscribed to these points of view for the simple fact that it would be too easy to kill a competitor site by submitting their site to a ton of directories using a directory submission tool. It just wouldn’t make sense.

As for a directory owner banning you because you used a piece of software to make the submission -  well  there’s simply no way for a directory to know that a tool is actually making the submission as opposed to a human typing into the fields on the submission page - in both cases the submission page will be loaded into a web browser and the fields completed in a client browser before the form is posted back to the server for handling.

Of course, using a directory submitter tool does have downsides. These downsides won’t harm your site but they might lessen the benefits of having your site listed in loads of directories. The downside of any submitter tool is the speed of submission and the temptation to submit to hundreds of directories with the same title and description every time. The best strategy for directory submission is to maximise the number of variations of title/ anchor text and description so that you get a good range of links with different anchor text. Try to use one variation per 25 to 50 directory submissions.

So what tools are available? Well there are a number of free tools. One of the best is SliQ Submitter.

SliQ Submitter Screenshot

SliQ Submitter lists over a thousand directories and also lets you store multiple variations of titles and descriptions. It tracks which directories you’ve submitted sites to and even lets you export a list of submitted sites to Excel. Personally, I like to use this tool to make 10 to 50 submissions a day over a number of weeks. This lets me keep complete control over the submission process and let me build a nice set of links over a 3 or 4 month period.

Download SliQ Submitter from here.

Uncategorized

By default, a Wordpress installation is nofollow, i.e. any comments on the blog will have the rel=”external nofollow” attribute applied. There are a number of reasons for going dofollow and rewarding people who make a good comment with a decent backlink. One easy way to make a Wordpress blog dofollow is to install the Do Follow Plugin by Semiologic. Follow these instructions:-

1. Go to http://www.semiologic.com/software/dofollow/ and download the sem-dofollow.zip plugin.
2. Unzip the plugin to a folder on your hard drive.
3. Upload the unzipped plugin folder to the wp-content/plugins folder for your Wordpress blog.
4. Log in to the admin section of your blog and activate the Do Follow plugin

Your blog is now dofollow!

Take advantage of your new dofollow status and add your blog to one of the many dofollow directories. Hopefully you’ll soon start getting decent comments. Your life will be made a lot easier though if you also activte the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress too.

Wordpress SEO Tips

Whenever you ask for advice on SEO for a website, the main advice you get given on webmaster and SEO forums is to keep building links. This is usually closely followed by advice to keep adding fresh content. Link building is an essential part of SEO - having great content is good but nothing beats a nice set of links from high PR pages.

As far as adding new content regularly, if your site ISN’T a blog, I’ve never found that adding lots of fresh content has significantly improved the site’s ultimate performance in SERPs.

What I mean is that if your site is selling a particular product or service it’s usually optimised for a specific set of keywords. If I have a page optimised for a specific keyword then the performance of that page in SERPs doesn’t seem to improve a great deal just because I add extra pages to my site on a similar topic. The extra pages might start to do well for the keywords they target but the older pages on my site remain pretty static in SERPs unless I go and get more incoming backlinks. The hard part about adding new pages is to make the pages work as well as your existing pages. After all there’s likely to only be a smallish set of keywords that are worth attacking in SERPs.

I’ve come across some people who were a bit overkeen on adding new content to their websites. I’ve seen sites almost turned into article directories where they add a new page containing a short article every couple of days. As more and more articles get added, the article contents gets increasingly irrelevant to the main topic of the site. The articles will pick up long-tail traffic but the traffic will be mainly junk as the visitors will land on a page with little relation to the main purpose of the site. Some people put in more effort and try to write more and more  landing pages for different keywords. Often they end up falling into the same trap as the pseudo-article directory approach, the keywords on each page get less and less relevant and although the number of visitors increases, the visitors are less and less likely to stay on the site and buy the goods on offer.

Some tactics for adding fresh content can have a negative effect on SEO and should be avoided. Never be tempted to add a directory (like a PHPLd directory) to your site expecting that as people submit listings your content will grow and improve your SERPs performance. Directories are unlikely to be looked on favourably by Google.

In most of my site’s niches my main competitors have very static sites with homepages that change very infrequently - sometimes not for months. This doesn’t seem to harm them and their position in SERPs is very stable.

Of course, regularly adding fresh content (new pages or additional or altered text on existing pages) does have advantages. If your site is updated often, Google will reindex your site more often, meaning that any changes you make will be reflected in the SERPS more quickly. For example, if Google reindexes your homepage every day, you can try out a new title tag with new keywords one day and see how you do in the search results the day after. If Google only reindexes your site every couple of weeks, you’ll only be able to see the effect on SERPs of a change once every two weeks.

So, does adding fresh content improve SERPs performance? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and “maybe”. Yes, fresh content helps if you have a blog and you just want to attract visitors and readers - who might be tempted to click on some nicely placed Adsense. If your site is selling a product, if the new content is highly relevant to the product and written to encourages sales, fresh content is very useful. It can be a lot of effort to come up with great new content though. Don’t worry though if you can’t keep coming up with new content, your old content will still keep on working for you.

General SEO, Keywords, Link-building