Two extremely popular and important Internet directories are DMOZ and Yahoo! Unlike Google, that is a search engine, directories organise links under various categories and sub-categories. Due to all the hype that search engines get most web masters fail to recognise the significance of submitting their links to Internet directories. Although very few people these days prefer to sift through the directory categories to find the links they want, search engines use these web directories as potent referral systems and there is a reason behind it.

You have to — in most cases — manually submit your link to a directory. Once you have submitted the link, a human reviewer visits your link. So all your links are subjected to high level of scrutiny, which is not possible with software assisted submissions. When your link is approved and included in the directory, the search engines consider it as a validation and hence they attach more value to your presence in the directory rather than on some other website.

Another benefit of getting your link included in web directories is that your link is indexed by the search engines quickly. The search engine crawlers crawl the Internet to obtain information on the recently updated or created links, and they start the crawling with the web directories and first crawl all those links present in the directory. Besides, whenever new search engines are launched, they automatically go through the Internet directories to quickly index the already-validated links. This saves you tons of time in submitting your links to various search engines.

Here’s a quick summary of the benefits of submitting your links to web directories:

Directory submissions give you one-way links

Search engines give importance to the number of inbound links to your site and from web directories you get one-way inbound links. Web directories, while including your links, don’t expect you to put their link on your website. Search engines discourage link-exchange tactics but they consider one-way inbound links with high regard.

Directory submissions allow the anchor text of your choice

When you submit your links to web directories they allow you to enter a site title (site title is different from the URL) that can contain your keywords. This generates SEO anchor text for you and this helps you improve your search engine rankings.

Directory submissions are mostly free

Yes, you don’t have to pay for most of the web directory submissions. There are some highly professional web directories that charge a high premium for adding your links but their number is miniscule compared to free directories.

Directory submissions send you targeted traffic

The organizations of web directories make people find the right links under the right categories. Even if you, inadvertently of course, submit your link under a wrong category, there is a great possibility that the human editor will place your link under the correct category.

So you see there are overwhelming reasons to submit your links to the various web directories. You should either do it yourself or assign the task that does directory submissions professionally — it’s worth the cost.

If you are a person who searches for article marketing tips on a regular basis, then you must have heard about the change where the search engines are changing their keyword relevancy algorithm to a term named as latent sematic indexing or better known as netZtrack. So how is this going to affect your articles? The effect is that, your attempts of filling the article with many keywords, as many as possible, to increase the visits and improve your ranking is not going to help you in any manner.

Let hope that this change will help in eradicating articles filled with non-sense from the top of the page list ranks and putting there something more sensible and useful in its place. This requires the writers to change the content and style of writing to ensure the visibility in the engines.

Apart from the disadvantage of having to improve the content by applying additional thought to the topic, the advantages of the style in which the content are constructed are many. The latent semantic indexing is nothing more than a mere fancy title which describes the total number of terms which are related to the topic used in a combination with each other on any given page. This is to mean that, if you happen to type in a word for search, the engine searches about the topics which are directly and indirectly connected to it. For example, If I type in the word investment, it will go in search of shares, gold, land etc. and many other terms which may in any related to the topic.

The various related topics produced are termed as “Expert verbiage”. All of this might seem like a technical jargon, but it really isn’t anything too technical and it is all about simplicity and being natural. In fact every one of us includes expert verbiage in or day to day conversations during subjects that maybe knowledgeable.

The advantages of constructing the content of your article according to the netZtrack, not only helps in you in increasing the rankings in the search engine page results, but it also proves to be beneficial to the reader and helps in commanding the authority of your articles.

Articles content is ranked on three main bases. One- the information provided by the content must be useful and informative to the reader, Two- The content should be of high quality and unique in nature, Three- Usage of expert verbiage, so that the engine can search accordingly, as it is themed.

A content which is written according to the netZtrack’s standards must sound natural and human so as to assist both the bots present in the engine and the reader of the content. It’s about expressing the integrity of the article and the sincerity in providing the appropriate information rather than a mere ranking motive. It is similar to building a relationship with the reader in assisting them in the right manner without mocking their intelligence and wasting their time by ensuring the integrity of the content. Ensuring such standards will guarantee a visibility in searches of the content. As promotion of top quality content is what is required now.

There is no denying the fact that getting inbound links to your website is the key to improving your ratings with the search engines. The more inbound links you are able to get, the more effectively your rankings will begin to rise. Inbound links have always carried value for search engines because they use them to rate a particular website. This is why contextual link building has become an extremely popular SEO strategy that can help pave the way to success on the World Wide Web.

The popularity of contextual link building has gone up in recent times. But not everybody knows how to successfully employ this tactic which is why it may lose its effectiveness in certain cases. You will find some people producing artificially generated links, a practice that doesn’t work well with Google. The think tank behind Google has developed certain ways in which it can differentiate which site is truly popular with the masses from those that are trying to deceive it which is why contextual link building must be executed to perfection.

Contextual link building solution

An SEO company develops its strategies on the changing algorithm trends of Google and contextual link building is an offshoot of the changes made by Google. The single most important thing that differentiates contextual link building from all other forms of internet marketing is the fact that it has the ability to connect well with the masses through the human touch. Consequently the links are naturally generated and Google can not target them as being manipulated.

In order to give Google the impression that the links are real you need to have great content written by specialist writers. When the links are placed inside great content the chances of naturally intriguing the readers will increase and this works well with Google.

The other most important aspect is to post these expert reviews on blogs that are on different classic C IPs. This is to ensure that search engines are unable to detect a similarity between the websites that contain links to your site. The nature of these blogs should be such that they are themselves popular amongst the masses as well as the search engines. This is a very important point in that by posting your reviews on blogs that have a steady readership, you will be able to lure targeted traffic onto your website along which you will get a flow of link juice.

Finding such blogs on your own could be a rather overwhelming task. However if you go with a professional SEO company the latter will have a number of such blogs as part of their blog network. They will determine the most effective blogs in which to post your reviews and thereby help you derive maximum benefits.

Furthermore the SEO company will also have the resources and the expertise that will enable them to back up the contextual link building efforts with other popular link building strategies like article marketing. This is beneficial in that it further optimizes your site for the search engines.

Many mistakes can be avoided when designing your website but it takes more than a good eye to know what they are and how you can ensure that your Search Engine Optimisation is fully effective.

The most important page on your website is the Home Page or the landing page. If you want all the SEO and effort in getting visitors to your website to pay off, it is important that your landing page encourages visitors to linger and to take a good look around your website. For that to happen, the design needs to be clean, clear and welcoming and for your web-page titles to properly reflect the content of the web page. Although the web page title does not feature on your web page, it is prominent in the browser bar and is one of the search engine optimisation elements that will help to attract your customers.

It may seem obvious, but good website copy that is well-written is also a key feature to consider seriously. There should be enough copy to inform the reader and enough copy to enable you to lace appropriate key words for effective search engine optimisation.

Links are another key feature of most web pages and it is amazing how many times links are incorrect and a customer is taken to the wrong item or web page. Check your links regularly, as there is nothing more annoying for a visitor than a link not working.

Creating a website that looks good is the secret to SEO success but there is still much to do to ensure that the search engine spiders like your website. For example, photos and images should be described correctly in the image tags, bearing in mind that the search engines can only read pictures and not see them. It’s a good idea to use the image descriptions as another opportunity for working in your key words for SEO. Some browsers also pick up ALT tag-descriptions, when the pointer hovers over the image, which offers a further opportunity for some good image SEO.

A question for my blogger friends – Do you really value SEO? Have you been following the same in your blog entries ? Does your writing get affected by the same ? Does SEO worry you a lot ?
I don’t know but yes I get this feeling that we as a blogger tend to put much attention on this SEO thing. Can’t say the same for everyone but anyways, majority of the bloggers especially those into niche blogging seem to be focusing more and more on this SEO part. Well, you certainly cannot ignore SEO but finally it all comes to your loyal readers who make the most of your blogging. The loyalty of your blog readers finally cannot be matched with what you get from the search engines. That’s pretty obvious. And therefore, it has to be the no.1 priority for any blogger or webmaster alike. Still, we cannot put SEO aside as we all need traffic in the end but eventually it is what people see when they get there that determines if they will return, and YES we do want them back!

Getting ahead with the same, I have been through numerous blogs where I was quick to notice one peculiar thing. Most of them had absolutely no SEO work being done on their posts and yet the traffic graph was soaring up like anything. And to add to it, most of them were professional blogs. Yes, you have to believe it now. You have to stop writing for the search engines and need to put more emphasis on your readers for reasons as mentioned below :

You want it to be read

Don’t you want it to be read? Do you want people to appreciate your writings? Don’t you want people to benefit from the same? Yes, we all desire for the same. But very often we ignore all these by being more SEO-Centric. In an effort to put the right keywords at right places, we end up being vague and unnatural. Thus frustrating our readers. Do you want it to be the same? Of course not. We have to impress them not frustrate them. You need to be looking at successful blogs where loyalty has been a major contributor to the overall growth and success.

Your style of writing is preferred

The way you communicate to your readers is a major factor in determining your blog’s popularity. Putting off those keywords, you are in a much better position to convey your thoughts and personality as well! You begin to appear more informative and entertaining. And mind you – This is what your readers prefer !

You get more and more reference

Well, sharing and caring is what blogging all about. And when I like it, I do share it with my friends. I recommend it to all those whom I know as I see them benefiting from the same. And they also continue to do the same by referring more and more people. Thus, generating much needed traffic on blogs which in other case wouldn’t have been much effective with the search engines.

Your posts are free from complications

It happens naturally when you stop putting much emphasis on optimizing entries. Thus making your posting a breeze thereby minimizing the difficulty and time that goes into a task that is performed quite frequently.

Making use of the traffic by writing quality posts

So, when you have finally managed some decent traffic on your blogs, its time now to concentrate more towards catering to the needs of your readers instead of search engines. And once you begin to do this by writing quality postings, you solve your traffic problems to a great extent. One must see blogs as highly focused social gatherings and communities where words do pass quickly among bloggers of similar interests.

So, here we go again with yet another series of blogging tips for bloggers. The whole idea behind this posting is to let you think beyond SEO. SEO cannot be ignored by any means but to put it very rightly, you need loyal readers first rather than an optimized post which becomes hard to read and understand. Must remember – Your blogging success is more about the ‘loyalty’ of the blog reader and not necessarily a properly optimized post.