SEO Tips

For few years now I’ve stopped submitting sites of my client to SEO friendly directories that are being advertised in DP forums and DirectoryCritic. And here’s my reason:

1. Fly-by-night directories. I just feel that after seeing directories retired after 1-2 years of being online it’s not worth it anymore to submit to these directories. After getting money from paid listings, directory owners tend to forget or choose not to renew the domain

2. Poor moderating. I saw directories accept lots of links that are not related to the categories of the directories. This is because owner of this directories doesn’t have time or doesn’t care on the quality of the site they’re accepting.

3. Waste of time. After submitting to these 100’s to 1000’s of directories and you end up getting your site listed to 5-10% of directories. And most of them are full of links already to the point that it wouldn’t even appear on Yahoo Site explorer as backlinks because you’re on the 10th-20th page of the said categories.

There are other ways to get backlinks and exposure for your site. Directory submission isn’t one of them. Stop wasting your time purchasing or doing the manual submission. It’s a complete waste of time and has very little or no effect on your sites progress. In my next article I would introduce you some of my experiments so stay tuned.

Trusted Directory List

There’s still directories that take pride to their site. And here’s a great list I’ve found in webproworld forum.

DMOZ – http://dmoz.org/
YAHOO – http://dir.yahoo.com/
GoGuides.org – http://www.goguides.org/
JoeAnt – http://www.joeant.com
Zeal (non-commercial) – http://www.zeal.com/
Gimpsy – http://www.gimpsy.org
HotRate (must be an editor) – http://www.hotrate.com
Xoron – http://www.xoron.com/
Lycos Directory – http://www.lycos.co.uk/dir/
business.com – http://www.business.com/

Canada
Proudly Canadian – http://www.porthardybc.ca/
LocalSites.ca – http://www.localsites.ca/
CanadaOne.com – http://www.canadaone.com/
StartPage.ca – http://www.startpage.ca/

UK
Limey Search – http://www.limeysearch.co.uk/
dotukdirectory.co.uk – http://www.dotukdirectory.co.uk/
Splut.com – http://www.splut.com/

Australia
Ausie.com – http://www.aussie.com.au/
AAA Smart Search – http://www.aaa.com.au/
The Australian Internet Directory – http://www.directory.com.au/

Columbus internet marketing company offers local search marketing services for a business that is based on certain geographic location. It can help local businesses to gain maximum online exposure by using white hat methods. It specializes in various types of local internet marketing including real estate, restaurants, auto dealers and hotel internet marketing. It can be difficult to rank your company website in the local search engine result. In order to rank well in the local search result, you have to conduct in depth analysis on various types of keywords. You have to test many marketing tactics before you can achieve a higher ranking on the internet.

To help your website get better visibility, the SEO company will verify your listing. The verifying of your listing is free of charge. The staff will manually verify your business via phone or post card. After that, the staff will check to see if the information about your business is the same in different directories. It is important that your business information on the directories is the same because Google want to make sure that the descriptions are accurate.

The SEO company will get people to write positive reviews about your business. The search engines always recommend websites with many positive reviews. The reviews will be written by previous customers who have experiences in using your services and products. They will provide information such as geographic location and type of product when writing the review. When your website has a lot of positive reviews, it will rank higher in the search engine result.

The ranking of your website will increase with the help of a local search engine marketing service. Local customers will be able to easily find your website after it gets ranked in the local search result. It will promote your website in the local search result of several major search engines.

Many newbies in pay to click marketing don’t know how to manage their advertising campaigns. As a result, they waste thousands of dollars in pay per click marketing. It will take a long time to learn how to manage the PPC campaign properly. If you did not attain the intended result, you can hire the pay per click marketing service at SEO Positive. SEO Positive is a certified partner of Google Adwords. Its staffs are trained to monitor all kinds of PPC campaigns. With the help of the PPC marketing expert, your ad will achieve maximum exposure. You will get a higher sales conversion rate.

SEOpositive.co.uk is a SEO company specialized in offering various types of internet marketing services. The search engine optimization service can help your website to achieve a higher growth. SEO Positive has a team of workers that is specialized in building links for your website. It will obtain backlinks from a variety of sources including blogs, forums and relevant websites. SEO Positive will try to make the link building process as natural as possible. Although it supports natural link building, it also buys links from several high quality websites that are relevant to the client website niche. By purchasing the links slowly, your website can achieve a higher ranking in the search engine result over time.

I just noticed today that some of my site that I’m tracking, updated it’s PR. It’s unusual that PageRank toolbar updated because only few weeks ago since the last update. Usually it will take 3-6 months before the Pagerank Toolbar gets updated. Anyone seeing the PR update part 2?

Online marketing has changed in the past few years. I remember when I’ve started this SEO blog, one of the most effective
way to gain traffic from your niche is by marketing your site through link directories,forums,and blog sites. It was 5-7 years ago when blogs really hit it’s peak in terms of popularity in Search Engine Optimizations. I cannot say blogs don’t matter anymore in marketing your site, but most of the people now are busy checking their facebook, twitter, and other social media accounts.

Right now social media marketing is the most effective way to reach your potential readers, clients, or buyers. I could say Facebook and twitter is the hottest trend among them. If you don’t now how to do facebook marketing you could ask for professional internet companies like axxoo.com. They offer the most effective way to maximize your social media marketing campaign. They also offer google advertising service to help you on your adwords campaign as well.

SEO is really a fast paced industry. You need to cope up with the latest trend in the internet to be able to beat your competitions and maximize your earnings potentials. Right now I don’t see social media to be taken over with another trend. But who knows, probably another website will take over on the popularity of facebook and twitter in the near future. We never know what lie ahead in the future. The only thing we can do is to keep ourself updated, and make sure you strike while the iron is hot.

In December 2010, search engines Bing and Google confirmed to the world that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook directly impact on search engine rankings. Social media is a great platform for sharing links but what are the factors that improve the effectiveness of social sharing?

Something known as ‘social authority’ is a way that search engines measure the importance of a social media page. Things that could affect your social authority include:

• Following: follower ratio – in a very similar way to links, the more followers you have the best. But low quality followers and illegitimate accounts could be detrimental to your overall following: follower ratio.
• Follower quality – the quality of your following on Twitter could play a big part in how search engines rate your profile. If your followers have a high social authority, it indicates that you yourself are of high social authority in the social network.

When passing links on Twitter, your social authority will contribute to the quality of the link, but it’s also important to have diversity in your link sources. This is where investing time into Twitter SEO interaction really pays off; 10 links from 10 unique Twitter accounts is more powerful than 10 links from the same account.

Building relationships with other social networkers will improve your chances for getting links ‘retweeted’ and shared by others, which also leads to the subject of link relevancy. Attract relevant followers, pick thematic content and post interesting Tweets to boost engagement level.

If you’re able to engage high authority, relevant followers, you will have the perfect recipe for search engine optimisation on Twitter.

Just received another Christmas gift from Linkworth.

It’s my 3rd straight year that they gave me Xmas gifts. On my first year as Linkworth publisher, they gave me Christmas card only. On year 2009 I received a micro USB stick with the logo of linkworth embedded on it. The size of the USB stick is about 1 square inch.

Christmas 2010 Gift is more special than the previous two. This time they gave me a beautiful Christmas card plus the blue blanket with linkworth logo embedded on it.

Thanks Ron and the whole Linkworth community.

Resized image:

So you are spending much time, sweat and money in improving your search engine rankings and traffic. You’ve hired a website design company and implemented your all new singing and dancing website. But how do you know if you are improving and showing good growth?

If you are an SEO consultant or if you work in-house for a company, you will need to report to your clients or your boss on a regular basis and provide them with data that they can understand.

Below you will find a brief description of just a few metrics that will help you to ascertain whether you are on the path to search engine success, or doomed to page 10 hell!

-Number Of Landing Pages

If you use Google Analytics or a similar analytics program you will be able to see how many unique landing pages visitors are hitting. Ideally, you will want to receive visits to many pages on your site rather than just the homepage. By creating consistent and regular well optimised content, you should see an increase in organic search traffic and an increase in the number of landing pages visitors are hitting directly.

-Number Of Unique Keywords

As you build more links and add more content to your site, you should notice that the number of unique keywords people are finding you with increases. More links, equals more page rank, deeper crawling and better indexing of your pages. The more pages you have indexed the more keywords you will be found with.

-Number Of Linking Domains

When it comes to SEO, link building is crucial. If you want to compete in competitive niches, you will need to manually create links and create good content that will attract natural links from other websites.

Many use the number of links as a metric to determine who well their link building is going but this is not the right thing to measure. The most important metric to measure is the number of unique linking domains as this represents a more detailed view of how popular your site has become.

-Number Of Pages Indexed

As mentioned previously, the more links you have, the more page rank will flow to your homepage and sub pages. More page rank means that Google especially will crawl deeper into your pages and index more of your content. This is good as the more content you have indexed the more long tail traffic you will attract.

-Number Of Branded Search Visits

Lastly, the number of branded search visits is a really important indicator of success. Brand recognition is the ultimate aim of any marketing campaign. By checking your analytics program over a period of time, you will hopefully find that more people are starting to find your site by typing in your brand name. This means your site is gaining greater mind share and overall visibility.

While testing the latest Google browser Chrome I just noticed something different on my SERP’s. Because I usually find my site on top 10 of the keyword “SEO TIPS”. But after checking it on Chrome, it is nowhere to be found on top 10. So I’ve made couple of keywords search using Google.com/ncr in Google Chrome, and in Mozilla Firefox. And to my surprise, I’ve found out that the results are really different if you will use Chrome of Firefox. Here’s some of the keywords I’ve used.

Click the image to enlarge

In Chrome

In Firefox

In Chrome, seopinoy.com wasn’t in top 10. But in Firefox it’s now #1 for the keyword ‘SEO Tips’

I’ve used 3 keywords search, this time “make money online”

In Chrome

In Firefox

You will noticed on that image that there’s a slight difference on the search results on top 6.

My third keyword is 1 word only. “Food”

In Chrome

In Firefox

Examining the images above, I just noticed that the first 2 keywords that I’m checking was that they have different competitions. So to cut the long story short FF and Chrome might be using different datacenters in getting date for SERPs. I don’t know if it’s what Google design it, or it’s just a coincidence. But nevertheless, it is something that an SEO specialist should get attention about. Different browser, Different SERP’s, Different incoming traffic, and different conversions.

I just felt it’s my responsibility to let my readers know that there will be a spectacular SEO/SEM event will take place here in the Philippines. If you’re serious about learning about SEO, you should attend this 2-day event. Here’s some quick info about the event

WHAT: The 4th SEMCON 2010
When: October 7 – 8, 2010
Where: Hotel Intercontinental Makati City, Philippines
Who: Meat and Learn this SEO Rockstars.

Aaron Wall, Founder, SEOBook.com
Todd Malicoat, SEM Consultant, Stuntdbl.com
Jim Boykin, Internet Marketer, WeBuildPages.com
Charlie J. Ellis, SEO Strategist, Gallant Fish
Giovanna Villanueva, SEO Consultant, Wordtracker
Michael Borras, CEO, Tupalo.com
Dean Chew, SEO Engineer, Ayima Search Marketing

How much: Conference Registration Fee

- Php12,000 for two (2) days, inclusive of meals and conference kit

- Php7,000 for one (1) day, inclusive of meals and conference kit

- US$270 for two (2) days, for foreign delegates

Discount: 5% discount on or before 15 September 2010

5+1 Package: Send 5 delegates and add 1 for free.

Contact Details: Call +632-8960639, 8960637, email: fiera@info.com.ph.

More details can be found here:

http://imvsolutions.com/semcon2010/
http://www.fmi.com.ph/?page=events&eid=26