Directories Submission - Couple of helpful tips

What is a directory?

A directory is a big website that contains a categorized listing of links from all the over the web. Those links can be companies websites, articles, services or softwares.
The directories supposed to help surfers to locate the efficient link or website they are search for. Directories structure consists of a collection of categories into which links are separated.
For example a category can be “Sport & Games”. In large directories categories can have sub-categories in order to be more accurate.

My tips

When submitting, find the category and sub-category where your website fits best in each directory. Incoming links from appropriate directories bring traffic and help your site's search engine rankings. Don’t forget that your Page Rank is breathing incoming links.

Prepare your text before submitting to any directory.
Write a short description of your web site purpose. Use in the description two or three keywords that you hope to be found for (keywords).

Don’t use marketing fancy language in the description.
If you sold flowers and wanted to be found for terms such as "roses", you might write it simply as that, without using convincing words such as: Free, cheap, amazing etc.

There are a lot of automatic directories submission services in the web. It’s sound great because manual submissions may be very intensive, time consuming way to build incoming links.

However, Manual submission definitely gives you a greater control of your submission.
I recommend not using automatic submission services. Manual submission is more effective, as it goes through all the relevant information. In addition, Automatic submission services often aren't reliable.

Never submit a site under construction or site that has blank pages or dead links. Directories don’t want to see the messages: Under Construction” or “Coming Soon”. Before you submit Check the quality of the directory and ask yourself the following questions. Is it a spam directory? How frequently is the search engine scan the site (check the cache to see that )? Is it relevant to my site (relevance always has positive effect on promotion)? Does the directory list anyone who pays? Good Luck!

Idan Factor, SEO Expert

ExactFactor, Promotion services

Affiliate programs – What is it?

Affiliate programs started in 1996. Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, explained this idea as an Internet marketing strategy.
Amazon attracts affiliates to post links to books for sale on Amazon by promising them a percentage of the profits if someone clicks on the link and purchases books.
The affiliate helps make the sale, but Amazon does everything else: They take the order, collect the money and ship the book to the customer.

Over the past few years affiliate programs have grown enormously in popularity, taking many interesting forms. For many Web sites that don't deal much in e-commerce (selling products or services online) themselves, functioning as an affiliate is a good way to participate in e-commerce.

How it’s work? These affiliate Web sites post links or banners to the merchant site and are paid according to a particular agreement between the website and the advertiser. This agreement is usually based on the number of people the affiliate sends to the merchant's site, or the number of people they send who buy something or perform other action such as filling a lead form. Some arrangements pay according to the number of people who visit the page containing their merchant site's banner advertisement.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Payment

There are three major types of payment arrangements:

Pay-per-sale: The merchant site pays an affiliate when the affiliate sends them a customer who purchases something. Some merchant Web sites, like Amazon.com, pay the affiliate a percentage of the sale and others pay a fixed amount per sale.

Pay-per-click: The merchant site pays the affiliate based on the number of visitors who click on the link to come to the merchant's site. They don't have to buy anything, and it doesn't matter to the affiliate what a visitor does once he gets to the merchant's site.

Pay-per-lead: a with these programs pay their affiliates based on the number of visitors they refer who sign up as leads. This simply ameans the visitor fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

Epilogue

Affiliate programs work best when affiliates choose products and services that match the content of their site. If a content the website owner chooses affiliate programs well, everybody involved in the process benefits, including the customer. The customer wins because the affiliate Web site directs her to products she would be interested in.

I began with Amazon and I will finish with Amazaon. Watch this video and learn how Andrew made $11,000 from amazon's affiliate program.

You joined an affiliate program. Here are the 18 steps to take next

Idan Factor, Marketing Manager

Thanks to Makeitdigi for digitzing photos

Off-page optimization and the power of incoming links

Off-page optimization (or off-site optimization) is the name for promotion techiques which done outside your website and not by direct change of your website code. The numbers of websites which "recommended" your website is one of the important factor related your site.
Off page may include link building, directories submissions and social media marketing.
However, the numbers and quality of links pointing to your site is the issue in this article.

Off-page optimization has two major advantages.
First, you don’t need to be a pro webmaster to optimize your website off-page.
Secondly, Off-page optimization eventually is what really matters for Google and other search engines.

What is incoming link?
Incoming link is a link coming from other site to a your site.
Put your efforts, time and budget to get as many incoming links to your website as possible.
The number and quality of incoming links is an indication of your PageRank, one of google promotion factor.

incoming links are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have quality backlinks, and consider those websites more authoritative than others.

Google encounters difficulties when trying to scan flash or Javascript websites. If you have a website which is completely developed using Flash or Javascript you can outrank it using off-page optimization.

This is my list of tips regarding to incoming links

It's important to make a keywords research and choose your primary keywords.
A healthy mix of deep links in hyperlink text is very important. Make sure, each bunch of keywords are related and link each bunch of keywords to the same page.
Don't link only to your default page.

Don't get a link from a web page that contains hundreds of links.
This will only dilute the effectiveness of your link popularity.
Get incoming links from authoritative sites that have a large number of links pointing to them and already have high pagerank (Google method to measure incoming links).
Get links from contextually relevant domains.

Avoid backlinks which are redirected by JavaScript or Flash, as most search engines ignore JavaScript and Flash links.

Links which are part of a textual content will have more weight. Try to get a links in sentences. Get links that have your keyword term as the anchor text. "Anchor text" is the text highlight the link.

Try to locate your link in the top of the page. Links appearing more early in the page are valued better. For example, links that are located on the header will be valued more than links on the footer.

Change your anchor text from time to time. Try to include your main keyword but vary the text to be different.Make sure your keywords meaning is related.

Contribute useful tips to others at online forums. You can include a linkback to your site as a signature.

Get links from different sources and websites.
Do not concentrate on one particular source: comments, blog roll, directories, forums, blog, social networking. Build a healthy mix or incoming links.

You will receive better ranking if you have backlinks from well trusted large websites. Most domains ending with .edu and .gov are well trusted by search engines. See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well.

Here you can watch a nice video regarding to off-site optimization and also a on-page optimization. recommended.

Final words

Building incoming links infrastructure is extremely important to search engine optimization and it should be high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.
I hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.


Idan Factor, SEO expert ExactFactor
Free SEO tools

What is SEO and do I need it?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It's include all the efforts that people do in order to improve their website position in the search engines results pages.
website optimization require different kind of factors. Effective search engine optimizing is a combination of design, user friendliness, content, structure and most of all votes - how many respected websites recommended your website.

Search engine optimization is a necessary part for anyone who trying to make money or attract attention online. Let's assume that websites owners invested money in conventional advertising methods, such as placing banners ads.

Why do they need to spend more time and money to achieve a high ranking in the search engines? The answer is regarding the popularity of search engine in human life.

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search. In most cases most of your website visitors will find your website through search engines. When you search for a term, most search engines display organic results and sponsored results, such as paid ads.
Organic results are results which the search engine sort by relevance. It's mean that the first result should match most for the search term you had entered.
According to various studies, most people tend to trust organic results than paid ads and sponsored results and more likely to click a website which is located in the search engine result page .

A good position in the search engines can’t be bought in the same way as a banner or a sponsored listing. Researches have shown that most search engine users don’t click past the first three pages of search results; many don’t even click past the first page if they find what they’re looking for.

If your website isn't listed in the first three pages of the search engine, the chances that somone will see in the results page is dramatically decreasing.

You may be thinking that a search engine should be able to give you a good place in its results without you having to do anything special to your website. Indeed Search engines are constantly working on their technology to make sure they deliver the most relevant results, but there will always be a limit to how well they can operate. You can always help the search engines to improve your website "visibility.

If websites-owners prefer not to optimize their websites, but their competitors do it's mean they will lost a lot of traffic. Search engine optimization can serve a number of different purposes: Generate sales, both online and offline: generate leads, convince visitors to take the actions you desire, such as signing up for your newsletter, downloading white papers from your site, registering for a seminar, and branding your website and your company.

Good search engine optimization may bring potential clients to your site which are actually looking for what you are offering. A bad search engine optimization or no search engine optimization may end up hiding your site too deep in the search engine results pages, where hardly anybody looks. Even worse, you might not be targeting relevant keywords.

A professional SEO service or SEO expert may help you target the right keywords, build a quailty links infrastructure and optimize your website in the best way.

Remember that good SEO will attract targeted visitors to your website and provide publicity, exposure and revenue. Given this, investing in SEO, whether through spending money to have a professional do it, or spending time doing it yourself, can provide an exceptional rate of return.

Idan Factor, SEO Expert

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Hiring SEO Services or doing it by yourself?

Good search engine optimization will eventually increase the traffic to your website and improve your online goals. However, how should we do it can be a hard question. hiring SEO Company or SEO expert will certainly cost you a money and time and doing it by yourself may have negative affect on your website ranking.

Doing SEO by yourself

Optimizing your site on your own can be a good way to learn about running a website and retain complete control over your website which might make you feel more confident with the process. Many people enjoy trying to beat their competitors all by themselves. Is it worth the effort? Don’t forget that good SEO require basic programming skills as well as a understanding of the search engine industry. You may inadvertently adopt a spamming tactic and damage your search engine results. It takes a lot of time to learn how to optimize a web site properly, and you could quickly find yourself with more work than you have time for. In addition, managing your site’s optimization is an on-going process and getting the most from it requires frequent management.

SEO company - pros and cons

Good SEO costs money because it requires alot of work. If money is not your problem, hiring a SEO company or SEO expert can be a good Idea. Don’t expect to just hand your site over to a SEO services provider and wait for the traffic to come. It's not work like that. You will need to explain and define the goals of your website and participate in the process all the way. Hiring any SEO company involves a certain degree of risk and trust with the people associated with the firm. Working with SEO Company can last for unknown period of time. A good SEO company will keep up on the latest trends in the search engine industry. They will make necessary adjustments to your website or your campaign so you don’t lose rankings. This is an long process that may not end shortly It is a full time occupation just keeping up with all the change and transition that goes on. SEO companies will provide you with detailed reports that will show you where you are positioned on various search engines and will also provide you with web site traffic reporting. This type of reporting will show your website traffic and where it is coming from. This type of data is very important and will help you to effectively measure your return on investment (ROI). I found the following article on the web. It may give you more neutral information about that issue. Click here

Idan Factor, SEO expert

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