SEO For The Common Webmaster

Once you have your site up and running, one of the important things is to get your site noticed. To do this you need to build back links to your site. One way to build back links is to list your site in many directories.

There are many questions to consider when adding your site to a directory. Should you use a free directory or a paid directory? What should I put as a description? Should I pay for a featured listing? Should I only look for directories with High PR?

I always look for the best deal when trying to promote my sites. I submit to just about every free directory I can find. The exceptions is if the directory is filled with garbage links like porn or drug links. If I decide to pay for a link in a directory, that directory has to look better than a free directory, it has to have some age on it, it has to have a high PR, and it has to have very good traffic. Instead of buying a link on a directory, I would rather spend that money on a related niche blog or website. That is why, in my view, I prefer free directories.

When you fill out a description for your website, I would write as much as you are allowed and something that would make people want to visit your site. Use the key words you are trying to focus on and keep it simple. There is a debate in the world of webmasters as to rather you should write an original description for every directory you submit to. I would say it may be better but I like most webmasters do not always have the time to write a new one each time so I use two or three different ones for all my submissions.

Most directories, either free or paid, will offer a featured link for a price. Is it worth the extra price? One factor is how many featured links will be in each category. If they are selling five or less and it is a good price, I say it is worth it. If it is a high price or they sell too many featured links, you would be better to spend your advertising money elsewhere.

When looking at directories to submit to, one thing that many webmasters look at is the PR or Page Rank of the directory. If given the choice and all other factors are the same, I would recommend the higher PR directories. However, traffic is what you want so a directory with PR0 and a 1000 visits a day will be much better than a PR6 with 10 visits a day. I say look for popular directories that have a lot of listings and has good traffic. Another thing to look at is where they are in the search engines. Type in directories or free directories and see who is on top, those are the ones you want listings in.

One last thing I would like to mention is that many people offer a paid service to submit your site to many directories at once. This could be automatic with software or manually done by a human. Though I am sure that some of these services are legit and can help build you good back links, I think you are better to take the time and do the work yourself. My experience with these services are that they list your site in directories that are either junk or from foreign countries that will do no good for your site. I paid one guy and my site was listed in German directories that contained no English language sites. This will do little for traffic so it was not worth me paying for someone to do the work.

Directory listings are important to building links to your website or blog. It helps build PR, traffic, and helps in your search engine optimization to get you ranked in the search engines. Take the time to do some quality listings and you will reap the rewards.

Here is a couple of sites that can be of help with listing your sites:

Directory Critic : A great site that list many paid and free directories and other free tools.

DirZap: A Free Directory Submission Tool

You can build the best looking website on the Internet and do your best at SEO but it means nothing without the filling inside. The number one key when building a good website or blog is to have quality content.

When you build a website, it should not be built for Google or any other search engine, it should be built for the people you want to visit your site. It does not matter if you are looking to sale a product or to entertain people or just provide information, quality is what you should have inside your website.

If you have the ability to write everything yourself, I highly suggest doing it. However, if you are not a good writer, I recommend you hire someone to write articles for you. Make sure you look at some samples of their writing and do not accept garbage for your website. I personally write many articles for people and I am available to hire to write articles if you find the need arises.

If you decide to write for yourself, make sure to use a good spell checker and if needed a good grammar checker. I love to write and I think I am good at it but I can not spell worth a darn. Luckily, all of the major web browsers have add on spell checkers and if you use blogging software, those also include spell checkers. You could also write all your articles in Word and then copy and paste it to your website. This will both correct many grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes. Just remember quality is key.  You do not want a bunch of mistakes that make it difficult for your readers to follow.

When writing content for your site, know your audience. This means write in a way that is best suited to attract who you would like to read your content. If you site is geared towards the teen population, it is OK to have some slang in your content. However, if you are looking to sell business cards to professionals, it would be best to make sure you use correct terms and good grammar. A good example is this blog. I want to attract webmaster but I want the articles basic so that even the common hobby webmaster can understand what I am saying. My information is good for all webmasters but I do not try to talk over the new webmasters who are just starting out.

Another point is to know how much content you need. If your site is a sales page, you want to provide enough information to get your customer interested but not so much that they will get bored and leave your site. If you are an information site, you need to have a lot of content for your readers so they will keep coming back. Again, you need to know your audience and you need to know what they are looking for.

Updating your content and keeping it fresh and new is super important. If you have a blog, make sure to add content as often as you can. This also applies to information sites, people want new and fresh articles to read or they will visit once and never come back. If you own sales sites, make sure you keep the descriptions up to date and the prices. Nothing is more annoying for a customer than to visit a website and trying to buy something only to find out you no longer sell it or the price advertised is lower than the real price.

In the push to fill your blog or website with content, do not take short cuts. Duplicated content is frowned on by both the search engines and your readers. It is OK to repost a great article if you have permission to do so and you give a link back to the original source. Many webmaster take the easy route and just try to rewrite someone else work and pass it off as their own, this is a bad way to run your blog or site. Remember how we started this article, quality is key.

Quality content will not only make you look good for the search engines, it will also build a following of visitors and customers that could make your website the next biggest hit on the Internet.

I hope this article has helped you focus on content for your website and if you have a suggestion or question, please feel free to leave me a comment and I will reply. Please keep checking back for more articles for the common webmaster.

There are so many plugins when it comes to a WordPress blog. I use a few but one of the most important ones that I use for all my blogs is the All in One SEO Pack. As I mentioned in previous post, there are many things that are important when it comes to making your site ready for the search engines. However, to do some of them in Wordpress requires you to do some template modification.

With the Seo Plugin, this is not necessary. This plugin will automatically install meta tags and descriptions for every post based off you tags and your posts. You can of course tweak this to your own descriptions but if you do not want to take the time, it will be done automatically.

The other cool feature of this plugin is that it will prevent your articles from being duplicated in the search engines. You can have categories, archives, tag clouds marked as not indexed which means the search engines will not follow the links and they will not be indexed more than once. This prevents problems with possible duplicate content penalties from the search engines.

All in all, if you have the ability and time to do all the work yourself, I recommend you change the template and do it the exact way you want. However, if like me, you have no interest in changing codes or messing with the template, this is the plugin for you. It can be used as is or can be tweaked to your needs. It is well worth adding it to your plugins and best of all it is free.

Just remember Search Engine Optimization is never done. You will always need to work harder to be number one. This plugin is just a small step in to building a number one blog.

I see many webmasters panic when their site is not indexed in Google and the other search engines right away. Indexing is simply having your site placed in the search engine results. This is not uncommon and nothing to panic over. It takes a little bit of work to get your site indexed sometimes.

If you have a blog, either self hosted Word Press or a free hosted Blogger or Word Press blog, they seem to already set up for good SEO and they seem to index quickly. Part of this is they are set up to automatically ping other sites letting them know that you have posted. For example, this blog was indexed with in a few minutes of the first post that I posted.

Sometimes blogs do not get indexed quickly and many regular PHP and HTML sites do not. The next step would be to do something to get your site known to the search engines. Yahoo and Google both allow you to submit your site URL to them directly. You can also submit a site map to them. A site map is simply put, a snapshot of your website pages. This can be done quickly and easily by searching for a simple site map generator. There are many good ones. Once the site map is generated, you down load it to your computer and upload it to your server. Once you do this, you go to Google and/or Yahoo and follow the instructions to submitting the site map. Both do require you to have a free account with them.

Another way to get your site indexed quickly is to add a link on a popular or high PR site. This can be as simple as placing a link on a forum you use. You could also get a link on a related blog that is popular. The more often the site you add your link to updates, the better chance that your site will be seen by the search engines quicker.

Other ways to is to add your site to popular book marking or social sites. For example, I use Stumble Upon and I try to Stumble any article of interest. This helps get you traffic and it also gets your site out there to be seen by the search engine bots. There are many other sites that you can submit your site to similar to Stumble Upon.

The key to getting a site indexed is doing good Search Engine Optimization. You want to make your site as friendly and inviting as possible to the search engines so that their bots will come and visit. It takes a little work and the more work you do to tweak your site and promote your site, the quicker you will be indexed.

The result of any good project is you get out of it what you are willing to put into it.