Arcosweb SEO Course

SEO tools can greatly help speed up your work. Directory submissions is one of the areas where you will be needing software to help manage your submissions: track which directories you’ve already submitted to, which directories have already approved your submission, and automatically update the database as new directories come up. One of the reliable ones that I use in promoting websites is Directory Submitter.

After trying out several directory submitting softwares, this is so far the best tool of its kind and the most frequently updated. Compared to other similar softwares, the database is better structured and thus, operations are done faster. Up to 10 directory sites can be loaded at the same time on different sites. The support is good and the updates to new directories are frequent. This tool also allows you to track the ranks of your keywords in search engines.

If you’re not content or convinced with this directory submitter, you can try others:

Other Software to Try
Brad Callen’s Directory Submitter
Last time I checked, this was slow on switching between multiple websites. This was the first software I’ve used, and I could not understand why on my Pentium 4 processor, it took at least 2 seconds to switch between sites, switch between keyword phrases, and select profiles. When you’re working with several sites at once and multiple keyphrases for each site, this can be inconvenient.

Fast Directory Submitter

Submit Eaze

If you want to rank well in Search Engines, then don’t buy or sell links. This is a myth.

Advertising is Legal
Why? Because advertising is legal. And paying other sites to display your ads is legal. Search Engines know this. Google knows this. Yahoo knows this. MSN knows this. People PAY Google to be advertised. People PAY Yahoo to be advertised.

The problem arises when people use this to take advantage of search engines. To solve this problem, search engines came up with NOFOLLOW.

Use rel=NoFollow
When you sell advertising space on your site, make sure to use rel=Nofollow on those links. A nofollow on the links to other sites means that you do not vouch for those sites. That is, major search engines will not see those links as votes to those sites and wouldn’t be seen as an attempt to game the search engines.

This will be beneficial for your site in the sense that it doesn’t leak out PageRank to your advertise sites, and if they are penalized or banned, it won’t affect your rankings.

Personally, I would not suggest buying links to improve SEO rankings. That’s the wrong way to go. Buy nofollow links that will bring you traffic instead. Hire someone to submit to free directories instead, write articles and submit them to free article directories, and socially bookmark your articles on your sites. Those are definitely better options than paying for links, the effects of which will only be temporary.

What is Social Bookmarking?
Social Bookmarking allows people to bookmark their favorite sites, and associate “tags” or words with them so they can be easily recalled in the future. Other people can also look at the sites you’ve bookmarked, and they can also bookmark them.

Due to its social nature, it’s a very powerful tool for SEO. That’s why the quality of your articles are very important. Provide useful, free information that people would want to remember your pages for. Avoid sales talk, and focus on what the readers would be interested in. Think of things from the reader perspective. Why would they be interested? Why would they keep reading on?

Quality Articles
Write quality articles on your site, and bookmark them on Social Bookmarking sites such as DIGG, Delicious, Technorati, and etc. Ask your friends to bookmark these sites as well. The more exposure your articles get and the more useful they are to people, then the more chances those people will bookmark your site.

SocialMarker.com
One free tool you can use to easily bookmark your sites in dozens of Social Bookmarking sites in only a couple of minutes is SocialMarker. It helps to automatically fill in the fields, makes the sign-up and log-in process easier, and automatically moves from one Social Bookmarking site to the next.

AutoPoster
Another tool that can help you bookmark your sites semi-automatically is Autoposter.

ShareThis
Place ShareThis button on your website page or blog to easily allow users to bookmark their sites on their favorite social bookmarking websites.

Writing articles is a great way to get quality, relevant links. Write quality articles relevant to your products and services. Don’t write it in sales speak however. Try to provide useful information without promoting your company or your business. This will help you gain the reader’s trust. Put a link to your site at the end of the article.

Good quality articles are also a plus. Aside from the backlinks, it actually delivers some traffic if your readers found your article useful. It helps you to build a name in your niche.

Here’s a list of some article directories you can submit to:

http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/
http://www.amazines.com/
http://www.articledashboard.com/
http://www.article-directory.net/
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/
http://www.magportal.com/
http://www.isnare.com/

Avoid Duplicate Content
Don’t submit the same article over and over to hundreds of article directories. It’ll be a waste of your time since Google will consider them as Duplicate Content. That is, for most of the copies of the articles spread around the web, Google bot will only see a blank page.

One solution for this is to rewrite the articles, and use a softwaer called DupeFree Pro to check for the percentage of similarity. I only suggest you do this for your own articles and not to duplicate other people’s articles for legal reasons.

One of the ways to get one way backlinks are to submit to free directories.

Google’s Directory
www.Dmoz.Org is one of the directories you have to submit to. This is Google’s own directory, and though it takes around 6 months for your site to be accepted, it’s worth the wait. Getting accepted in Dmoz means a considerable boost to your ste, since a lot of other sites also use their directory. In that sense, you gain more links.

Yahoo’s Directory
dir.Yahoo.com is a paid directory. It’s $299 per year, but it’s worth it. Look at it this way, no one-day SPAM business would spend $299 for that. So being in yahoo makes your site more reliable.

More than a thousand free directories can be found at OneWayTextLink.com. You can use this handy tool to keep track of your directory submissions.

Finding Additional Directories
To find additional directories, you could type in the following variations in Google:

keyword phrase + “add URL”
keyword phrase + “submit URL”
keyword phrase + “add link”
keyword phrase + “submit link”

For example, if you’re selling real estate, then type in “real estate add URL", “real estate submit URL", real estate “add link", and real estate “submit link".