Posts Tagged ‘Directories’

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Building Links

There are a lot of different approaches to building links. The different types of links discussed in the previous post in this series can gain you links in various degrees of goodness. But like most things, quick-fix solutions rarely ever provide excellent long-term value. That’s not to say quick fix solutions aren’t sometimes needed or warranted, but they rarely make a good long-term investment.

A link only has a certain amount of value, much like the value of a casual acquaintance. But like a true friendship, a link relationship goes much further and has a lot more potential.

The concept of building links is best when it’s focused on building relationships. You’ve heard it said, “give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” In the same way, build a link and you get a link. Build a relationship and you get a lifetime of links.

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There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.

Back in the day, you know… the early 2000′s I loved to use relative links. Inserting relative links made websites development easy in cutting-edge programs such as Microsoft FrontPage. By using relative links you could move files around in your directory structure and FrontPage would automatically update all your link paths throughout the site, keeping them connected to the pages in their new location. No more manually updating all your internal links by hand! It was brilliant.

But now I’m not so big of a fan as relative links as I once was. I don’t have huge problems with them, but I understand the value in using absolute links rather than relative links. But perhaps I should take a step back and explain the difference between the two.

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1. How Can Small Business Compete in a Highly Competitive Paid Search (PPC) Market?
2. Sub-Domains vs. Sub-Directories – Google Clarifies a Change
3. AdWords Local PlusBox A Great Addition
4. 29 Ways to Use SEOmoz’s Premium Content for Search Marketing Success

As the campaign to go green by becoming more environmentally aware grows, so does the need for search engine optimization. Many users of the world wide web are becoming more world-friendly, and they’re searching for sites online. There are many parallels between going green and optimizing sites for higher search rankings.

Organic is Best

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According to McGaffin and Binnie, “If a site or a writer that you respect gives a link to further resources, then because of that respect you’re likely to follow it.”

Search engine marketing relies on several optimization strategies, including link building and link baiting. Put simply, link building is the process of going to other sites and creating inbound links back to your website; link baiting, on the other hand, is the art of getting other people to link to your site. Both will help get your website higher up on the search engines because the more links you have pointing back to your site, the more link popularity you have.

And you know how important it is to be popular.

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SEO For Google In Five “Easy” Steps

Seven Steps for Creating a Powerful Jump Page That Sells

Google Print Ads Now Open to All AdWords Advertisers

7 Costly Mistakes Webmasters Make About Web Directories

High Quality Links: Help with internal link structure in SEO

Remember when Yahoo and Google were best buds? Well, more like Yahoo was the King and Google did his search work.

Searching for “Yahoo Powered by Google” doesn’t return much today, but there was a time when people “searched” for things on the web rather than “Googling” them. In fact, people didn’t really care so much about search engines- the web was a simpler place where you could find what you were looking for on a portal, and sodas only cost a dime.

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I have not talked much about our new link program here in this blog, however I posted what we are doing over at Search Engine Watch Forums and have gotten some good feedback, which has also raised some good points we have not considered. SEO Book also picked up on the thread which generated some additional comments.

In the course of our efforts we’ve also have been getting feedback from those we are trying to “convert” from the old “link page” format to the new article format. While mostly positive, some of the negative responses range from, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, link pages have always worked just fine,” to “You don’t know what you’re talking about, ALL reciprocal links are useless.” (I’m paraphrasing the responses.)

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Just like Roy Thomsitt, I too have never searched for or liked web directories. His article talks about how Google may be honing in on search directories and decreasing their rankings with their new algorithm update.

“No directory owner has the divine right to syphon off Google’s hard won search customers. Google is doing a decent job at marketing: trying to look after its customers.”

“The message is not: ‘Hello, look at my pretty page. Do you like my Flash, and my clever graphics? And what about those links all over the place, aren’t they nice? You want to search? Hang on a minute, there’s lots of pictures for you to look at lower down, and how about going off to read about loads of other products. Oh, alright, you want to search; there’s a search box somewhere; near the bottom I think. You’ll find it….eventually.’”

I do a fair amount of griping about DMOZ with my major beefs being no way to track submissions and no sign if your submission was rejected, misplaced, rerouted or just sitting in purgatory for review. DMOZ bashing can be an art for some and so can the backlash from editors. Personally, I always tried to be realistic, offering constructive criticism and hoping that editors will take my genuine concerns, as well as others, seriously.

A couple of months back we changed our business name and URL, and began the process of changing links and whatnot. On my things-to-do list is to request listing changes at each of the major directories. I’m putting that off until we complete a re-working of our site which will be rolling out a bunch more services. Waiting to make the change will allow me to put together a more accurate description for all the services we will be offering.

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