What to Look For When Submitting To Directories!

Have you ever wondered what to look for when submitting to directories? If you’ve been doing SEO for any amount of time you probably know that directory submissions are a great way to build your authority. However a lot of directories are misleading and they’re really not that powerful and they won’t help your rankings very much!

Today we’re going to address this issue and show you what you need to look for when submitting to a directory, these tips should help you and we hope you’re rakings start improving!

The first step

• When you first enter into a directory the first thing you should look for is a correctly SEO’d directory, any really good ones will have a proper title tag, proper description and decent category selection for your website. If the directory does not have these three things leave immediately!
• If the directory has these three things it’s time to move on to the next step to see if the directory is worth submitting to, although we do not endorse using page rank as a guide, we do believe it’s valuable in the sense that if a page has page rank it will pass link juice to you. A directory should have inner page rank on it, at least one subdirectory if not many should have a valid pr.
• If it doesn’t have at least one subdirectory with a page rank it’s probably really new and not worth submitting to at this time. But if it does have inner page rank then more than likely you will get some link juice from the site and your website should be listed in this directory.
• Another thing to look for when listing your website in a directory is to check if it is paid or a free directory. Free directories are great but they don’t usually pass much link value to you, we know the paid directories can get expensive but for the time that your going to take to submit to a bunch of free directories one paid directory could do all the leg work for you. Since we believe this to be the case we do not endorse going to free directories because number one it probably does not have much link juice and number two it probably has a lot of websites in it already which are pulling all of the link juice that that directory has.

So basically the main thing to keep in mind is that most free directories do not pass much link juice to you, save your time and leg work, spend a little money and get in a paid seo directory that is going to pass some serious link value to you!

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CPC Overview

CPC or “cost per click” is the fastest way to get to the top of the page on search engines. The Top two web sites that offer this way to advertise are “OVERTURE.COM” and “GOOGLE.COM “ with its ” Adwords” campaign package. Google lists your chosen search term words within their own search network “IF” you choose this only. In addition they will list your search terms in their “Content Network” which is a list of other websites that “they believe” has something to do with your product or service, although to date they do not tell you exactly where that will be! Nor do they list the names of all their “Content Network” sites. For this reason we do not like the unknown of “Content Network” for our advertising, hence we choose to only be listed within Googles search network!

The #2 choice is “OVERTURE.COM” this company offers you a section known as “Precision Match” which list you in search engines such as Yahoo, Lycos, MSN and other well known partners. They also have a “Content Match” section which could go to any website they feel matches your product or service based on your advertisement text but not on your search term! This is much like Googles Content Network. Once again we do not like to advertise where we do not know exactly where we will be placed!

These CPC companies charge you each time a potential customer clicks on your site that they found on a page with the search term or specific keyword you have specified in your account set up within their guidelines. In more detail it works like this, When a web surfer or potential visitor to your web site types in a search word in a search engine like Google or Yahoo such as ” Texas Church” It will bring them to a page that has numerous websites that have chosen to list their site with this search term word. Those web sites that are advertising with the CPC are “sponsored listings” and will usually be in a box at the top of the page or on the side near the top in a colored section.

The way it works is you pay a minimum price per click which is currently 5 cents for Google and 10 cents for Overture for each keyword you choose such as “Texas Church” When you sign up you get an account that you can log into that shows the terms, keywords, total clicks and other info to your site on any given day, week or month and the cost among other items of interest. We have found that for a successful CPC campaign you should go to your Google.com / Overture ads to check your cost and position at least once a week. We choose Friday as this is the day before the weekends and the largest qty of people are surfing the net on the weekends when they are off work. If your competition out bids you on any specific search term they will get a better position then you. It is a bit like an auction/bidding system for position if you will. Being first on the list and on top is great but not always necessary. We have found that if you just maintain 3rd or 4th position you get about the same amount of clicks as you would in first place but you pay less money. It depends on your service/product as we have found that if someone is looking for a service or product that cost more then $ 100.00 a visitor/customer will usually shop around 5 to 10 sites before they make a decision. You can set a daily budget of any amount, for example lets say $10.00. If you have a price on any term of say 10 cents your site would get clicked on 100 times before it would go off line for the rest of the day. In our case we do not want our ads to ever be off line so we set our daily budget at a high price that would not be reached easily so it is always listed. This is very crucial if you are selling a product and you need to be found every time someone does a search for a keyword you have.

If you do not have the budget to get your site in the top CPC or sponsored listings then you only have a few alternatives. Free or non paying sites will always be below the top CPC listings/boxes. In order for your website to be close to the top in a free no cost section you will more then likely have to list your search term/words in the Meta Tags section and or somewhere in the body/text of any given page. Alt tags on photos etc. A search engine spider will then have to scan your site and find that specific word thereby placing it on the first, second, third etc. page. This also depends on the competition of that key word and how many links your competition has and or clicks they have received in the past which ads up to seniority and clout if you will!