SEO Tips & Information

Some new features have been added to SliQ Submitter Plus making it faster to submit to directories. SliQ is still a semi-automatic submitter and doesn’t crack captchas for you but it can submit on auto-pilot to several hundred directories.

Of course, with any directory submitter, you get out of the exercise what you put in so it’s better if you feed in a number of variations of website title and description before asking SliQ to automate further submissions. When it comes to matching categories, SliQ doesn’t make guesses - it only submits to categories that you’ve specifically chosen in the past - so before you switch on the auto option you need to make a few submissions in non-auto mode to let SliQ learn which directory categories you think are relevant.

Another neat feature that’s been added is the capability to export and import directory categories, so now you can share category selections between similar websites allowing you to switch into auto mode from the beginning of submission for a new site.

When the auto mode is switched on, SliQ will pasue if it comes across a directory with a captcha or where it can’t match a category - if you click the Skip checkbox on the fast submitter interface however, SliQ will ignore the directory and move on to the next. Choosing Auto and Skip lets you leave SliQ running while you go and do something else. At the end of the submission run, you can then flip all the skipped directories back to not visited status and go through them in non-auto mode.

Using the new auto mode, I managed to get about 500 submissions in an hour but I’ve only got a 1MB broadband connection. With a faster connection the submit time should go down towards the advertised submission every couple of seconds.

SliQ Submitter can be downloaded from http://www.sliqsubmitter.com.

Uncategorized

In the last few days, a new version of SliQ Submitter has been released that speeds up submission.

SliQ Submitter has always been a pretty good directory submitter. For a year or so it was free to use, then it switched to asking for payment. In the last few days though, sliqsubmitter.com has made two versions available. The existing SliQ Submitter 2009 has been updated and renamed SliQ Submitter Lite and a new SliQ Submitter Plus version has been launched. SliQ Submitter Plus includes a fast submission interface that works a lot like DigiXmas:

fast directory submitter interface

You can try the tool out for free and make 100 submissions. Having given the trial a go I managed to submit to 100 directories in less than 10 minutes. When you start SliQ Submitter Plus, a wizard prompts you to enter your website details - URL, description, title etc. Then you press the Fast button and the directory submission interface launches. All you need to do then is pick a directory category and press the Submit button (or press the F9 shortcut key). SliQ Submitter learns the categories you pick and will automatically select a category in a directory if it matches one you’ve used before. After 5 or so submissions, it pretty much always finds a match.

Semi automatic directory submitter

Here’s a list of the features I liked:-

1. SliQ learns the directory categories you select and always picks the deepest it can find when you next submit.
2. As you submit, the tool records the submission status (success/ failure/ skipped) in its directory list.
3. You can edit descriptions and titles as you submit and SliQ will record your additions/ changes.
4. If the directory submissions succeeds, the anchor text submitted is recorded.
5. If a directory submission fails it tries to capture the failure reason. 
6. When a directory submission fails, SliQ Captures a screenshot of the submission page which you can view by right-clicking on the directory.
7. SliQ sorts the directories into fastest submission order - High to Low PR with no captcha, followed by High to Low PR with captcha.

There is still work to be done on the new SliQ Submitter. It would be good to export submission stats to a PDF as well as Excel for example, and it would be useful to be able to decode captchas automatically to further speed up submission but all in all its a good, fast submitter.

Download SliQ Submitter Plus from the original site: http://www.sliqsubmitter.com.

Uncategorized

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.

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A couple of database-generated sites I own have in excess of 50,000 pages each. Building links for these sites requires a different strategy to link-building for my smaller sites with 5 to 10 pages.

With smaller sites you can quite easily build deep links to the inner pages of the site as well as links to the website’s home page. After building links to the main pages on a small site for a few months, you should end up with a good number of landing pages that do well in SERPs.

With larger sites though like PHPLd-based directories or PADKit-enabled software archives, it isn’t practical to build external links to all the pages on the site. The internal linking within larger sites is critical to the website’s performance in SERPs. Ideally, each page should get a decent number of links from some of the other pages within the site. As with all link-building, the best links are those from pages on a similar topic.

Link Back To Category Pages

Almost all large websites have a tree-like structure. The homepage links to category pages, the category pages to sub-categories and then finally, in the case of a software archive, to details pages. In the case of a software archive, each details page will show information about a single software package. The main link juice or PageRank for the site is likely to be provided by the external links to the site’s homepage. The PR will then flow like water through to the category and subcategory pages to the details pages. The link juice can be better distributed around the site by linking back from the deeper pages to the higher level pages as shown in this picture.

Link Related Pages

If the internal linking strategy ends here though, each details page is getting only a small share of the available link juice. By the time the link juice gets to the details pages it’s been divided up many times so that there’s little left. More work must be done to maximise the link juice to the details pages. The details pages are the real content of the site and the pages you really want to do well in SERPs.

A really good way of improving the performance of details pages is to link related details pages together. For example, on a software archive, if a text editor program is listed on one details page, the page could also link to 10 other text editor details pages on the same site. Luckily, when software is submitted to a PAD-enabled software archive, the PAD file lists keywords for the software so with a bit of programming you should be able to quite easily match programs based on keywords.

Link-building, Uncategorized