The position that your site holds in the search engine rankings is often closely tied with how well connected you are. That simply means how well you are connected to other sites, do you have authority websites or indeed any websites pointing in your direction. Whilst there is no doubt that having a link with an authority site is an ideal way to boost your ranking, the reality is that for a small or niche business this may be difficult or expensive to achieve. For this reason an alternative such as a directory can be a much better option.
A web directory is a site that collates links and sorts them into categories. These categories are available to the public and can be a valuable resource for people looking for information. It is not a difficult process to get your site listed in a directory, and there is the option to get listed for free, but this can take some time; or to pay a one off fee that places your site in the directory.
The greatest benefit to having your site linked via a web directory is that you automatically generate a degree of link popularity. Important factors that you will want to look at once you have done this are the ranking of your site in the directory, this means what page rank you have overall in the directory, and what rank you have for your particular category in the directory. After this you need to look at where you are listed on the page that you are on, and the number of competing sites. The number, quality and how competitive you are against those other competitor sites is very important once you reach that point.
There are some pros and cons to using web directories as a link building option. Firstly the benefit of a web directory is that it is often much cheaper to establish a link via a web directory than with some authority sites, requiring a one time fee to be part of a web directory as compared to monthly fees to remain connected with authority sites. The downside of this is that whilst a web directory is a good option for establishing link popularity and for traffic building, the directory is essentially a hub, it has no nice or authority website status. This is fine if you are looking at the bigger picture of building link popularity and boosting traffic flow. If you accept the limitations of directories and weigh up your options you may find a good authority site in your area which may be a more suitable option.
The major web directories such as Yahoo will bring in a decent amount of traffic, so if you are looking at this side of things then a one off fee to these directories is a further option to boost your traffic flow. You should know several things if you wish to use directories for this purpose. To start with, directories are often utilized for establishing link popularity, therefore smaller directories may help with links, but they do not offer much in the way of extra traffic. Also bear in mind that many directories offer listings in a first come first serve basis, or simply just alphabetically and the search algorithms used vary greatly from one directory to the next. Paying to be part of many directories then starts to become somewhat less attractive when you consider these things.
There are distinct benefits and drawback to having your site listed in a directory. Weigh up your options and see how you view the investment of time and money to list in a directory fitting in with your overall plans for link building and site traffic, and then you will be in a position to evaluate what benefits directories may offer you. Like many things, you may find that a mixture of several different option will best provide just the solutions you are looking for.
After you have built your webpages, the next step is to ensure it is properly "optimized", or search engine ready. To do this you need to make sure tou have all have the words you are trying to be found for on the search engine results in the body text of the site as well as the invisible meta tags. Many webmasters "tweek" each seperate page of their website for a different search engine. However, I would have to recommend that you focus on the largest of the Search Engines like Google and MSN Search exclusively. There is just too wide of a gap between the majore porta/engines and the medium-large players to spend time catering to them. I recommend a keyword density of somewhere between six and seven percent on the keywords you wish to come up for. Write the text in a way that the visitor is drawn to the page that you are targeting. Very broadly speaking, you should have somewhere between four and eight hundred words in the body of your pages. While the search engines are of prime importance for your site, you should not rely just on Search Engines or Directories for hits to your website. You will want to try alternative ways like web logs (also known as "blogs"), an e-zine you publish, free-for-all pages, usenet, articles, bulletin boards, and so forth.
The first lesson about search engine submissions is to simply do it by yourself. This will also save you much needed capital that can be better spent elsewhere. Even though here are a plethera of automated submission services out there, it is recommended that you submit your website to at least the primary Search Engines manually. This is due to the fact that the primary search engines are so vital, and some of them automatically reject any submission made from a program. Furthermore, each search engine has different allowable numbers of keywords and they vary on how many characters your site description can be. They also want different kinds of personal information (althought in some refreshing instances they just ask for your web address). Submission software, even when accepted, is generally not flexible enouph to cover all the bases. Plus, the reality is that manually submitting your website is easy enouph that anyone can do it, and I mean anyone who knows how to type a word. You essentially just go to the Search engine you want to submit to and click the "add website" or "add site" link. Then insert the website address. Actually a few are a tad more complicated than that, but most are really that easy. This is what some people are paying seo firms to do for them, sometimes not as well.
Some Search Engine "spiders" or "crawlers" will eventually find your website if you submit your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to them or not. They will find your site by following links from other websites that link to yours. For this reason you should consider trading links with other similiar but non-competing websites. Doing this will also give you website a higher ranking on some of the major search engines. This is because some engines, like Google and MSN for example, rate your website at least partially on it's "link popularity" with other websites. This is also a free way to help your site recieve more traffic without wheelbarrels full of venture capital. And sometimes these free methods are as effective than more expensive strategies and do not always take up more time.
Although meta tags are not as critical to your site as they were in the past, they are still of some value. Concentrate mainly on the title and description tags and make sure the keywords you want to come up high for are there. To find out if your meta tags are optimized, go to scrub the web dot com as they have a free meta tag checking service. They will automatically spider your webiste and give you suggestions on how many keywords each of your tags should have, etc. Some search engines, such Inktomi still give a relatively high relevence to these tags. When creating your "Alt" tags for your pictures on your site, do not stuff too many keywords there as the Search Engines, at least some of them, seem to be getting wise to this tactic and may penalize your page.
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Deep Arora has sinced written about articles on various topics from Site promotion, E Diet and Business Plan. Deep Arora is an Internet marketer with over 7 years of online experience and he teaches internet marketing from his blog at