In our first part of this article, we raised the question of whether blogging and its distribution tool, RSS feeds, are really useful for Internet and Search Engine Promotion. Are RSS feeds and blogs really the next big thing in web marketing, distribution, and content creation — or are they just hype? There is a lot of hype around RSS, blogs, and derivative technologies like podcasting. But are they really useful to the serious Internet marketer or are they just the subjects used by marketers looking to create new products to grab our hard-earned marketing dollars. We also covered the objections and reservations from some Internet marketers about the usefulness of RSS feeds and blogs to the bottom-line of their ebusinesses. This can be contrasted to our discovery of people like Willie Crawford and companies like Weblogs, which generate 6- and 7-figure incomes from blogs, RSS, and related technologies with Google Adsense. To illustrate, if the typical Internet marketers — not just web gurus — can benefit from blogs and RSS feeds, I promised to share my experiences with my new sites not yet optimized for the search engines. With virgin websites, I could observe the traffic pulling power of blogging, pinging, and RSS. If you would like to read or familiarize yourself with Part 1 of this article, you can read it at... http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/feb06-rss-prt1.htm. To test the effectiveness of the ability of RSS feeds and blogs to attract and drive traffic to my web properties, I did some quick and insightful research on the topic. Brandon Hong's Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS was the resource which best enabled me to understand the techno-jargon associated with blogs and RSS feeds. Believe me, I have a 10-year background in information technology, and I can't make heads or tails out of the alphabet soup served up by tech geeks on blog and RSS media. Plus, I run a very busy SEO consultancy and virtual real estate (VRE Adsense™ and Affiliate Sites) side business, so I don't have the time to muck around in nebulous articles on these topics. If you even remotely feel like me about the complexity of blogs or RSS, do yourself a favor and obtain Brandon Hong's multimedia ebook of screen-capture videos. You can read a full review of the book at... http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/hongrss.htm I have been blogging for almost 3 years, but RSS feeds have been harder to grasp in terms of development and marketing. The easiest way to start blogging is to setup an account with www.Blogger.com or www.Bloglines.com. Blogger will actually walk you through the process. Experienced web designers should not have a problem setting up a www.Blogger.com account. Blogger.com is actually a good initial choice because it provides an easy setup for RSS feeds. The setup can be done by going to the Settings Tab in Blogger, clicking the site feed link, and filling out the forms. The next issue to consider is the complex RSS compatibility issue. You can sidestep the decision about whether to go with RSS version 2.0 or Google's Atom standard by "burning your RSS feed" or making them more compatible with all popular RSS formats with a third party service like Feedburner.com. After creating your RSS feed in Blogger, you should have it burned in the Feedburner.com service; it will guide you through the process. The optimized Feedburner.com RSS feed is then ready to be submitted to the major RSS directories. I would suggest creating a few descriptions of your blog and then submitting both your blog and RSS URLs to the appropriate RSS and blog directories. My firm fast-tracks blog and RSS feed promotion by submitting them to about 90 directories that specialize in this type of media — including Yahoo! and MSN RSS content services. Both the Blogger.com service and, more extensively, Feedburner.com can be configured to ping the major RSS and blog directories. This means they signal or alert these directories whenever you update posts on your blog in real time. Perhaps most importantly, you get traffic statistics about your RSS subscribers and readers. The results of my RSS and blog traffic research over the last 3 months are amazing! I have been totally blown away by the research. I am excited about RSS and blog usage, despite the good and bad news: The bad news: According to a White paper on blogging, sponsored in part by Yahoo!, 88% of Internet users don't know what RSS technology is and 96% of Internet users stated they do not use it! The good news: 27% of Internet users experience RSS feed content on their My Yahoo and MSN web accounts, although they don't realize it! Moreover, 4% of Internet users actively use RSS feeds. This means 31%, or almost one-third (1/3), of Internet users in the U.S. read RSS feeds. With almost 150 million U.S. Internet users and 600 million net users worldwide, you do the math on the large numbers of people reading RSS feeds even if unwittingly). More positive stats on RSS and blog usage, according to the Pew Internet & American life project: - (1) Fully 19% of online Americans ages 18-29 have created blogs - (2) 11 million American adults say they have created blogs - (3) 27% of Internet users reported in November that they read blogs This translates into 32 million American adults who read blogs. This information shows that RSS and blogs are growing technologies for serious Internet business people to adapt into their marketing mix. My personal research over three months showed that when I regularly updated my blog sites, burned RSS feeds pinging the major directories increased my traffic a whopping 25%! Blogs, RSS feeds, and articles distributed regularly to major host sites and distribution services actually rivaled the traffic of my highly optimized top-ranking SEO and VRE sites. More importantly, traffic from blog, RSS, and article-driven traffic actually made twice as much income in sales and Adsense™ revenue than my traditional SEO sites. Needless to say, once a skeptic, I am now a big believer in the power of RSS feeds and blogs to boost my bottom-line. I will leave you with a controversial statement from a SEO and Searchpreneur©. Dr. Jakob Nielsen recently referred to search engines as "the leeches on the Internet." He feels "Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors." With Yahoo! and MSN soon to enforce email postage, according to a recent article by the New York Times, RSS and blogging may become the best and latest arsenal for small business to continue to survive and thrive in the Internet economy. About The Author:Kamau Austin,To stay informed on the latest blogging, RSS, and SEO developments, visit www.searchengineplan.com/blogs/seoblog.htm. Kamau Austin is publisher of www.eInfoNEWS.com and runs www.SearchEnginePlan.com. He is author of Always On Top -- How to Get the Highest Search Engine Ranking for your Website. See more about his strategies at www.AlwaysOnToptheBook.com.
Raise Your Website Traffic with RSS - Blogs and Yahoo!
Posted by sushithmn Labels: Blogging, seo, website promotion, website traffic, YahooGoogle's SEO Advice For Your Website: Content
Posted by sushithmn Labels: google, seo, website promotionThe web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content. I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point? Apparently not. Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Features Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings. I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google. The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features: • Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more. • Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same. • Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text. • Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text. • Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together. • Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword. SEO Bugbears and Sacred Cows A hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content. • PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought. • Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot. • JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do. • Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contained over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money. • Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page. Recommendations • • Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth. • • If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online. • • Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content. • • Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified. In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns. By Joel Walsh (c) 2005 About The Author:Joel Walsh's archive of web business articles is at the website of his business, UpMarket Content, a website content provider.
A web directory is a directory on the web. It specializes in linking to other web sites which are sorted by categories, which makes browsing more efficient and effective to its visitors looking for specific sites. Web directories accept links from webmasters or site administrators seeking to submit their site for inclusion, the sites are then reviewed by a human editor who usually does a review of the site to determine its quality and content before approving it.
TYPES OF DIRECTORIES
General
This directory basically consist of many categories divided into smaller categories and will include a variety of different website e.g. business, computers, health, etc. These directories can become quite large with the continual growth of categories and sites added.
Niche
These directories are also known as specialty directories in which they specialize or cater to one category of products and services or themes. These directories are quite useful less overwhelming than the vast content of a general directory.
Paid
A fee is charged for reviewing the submitted website, there is no guarantee of your site being approved and usually there is a no-refund policy (there are a few exceptions to this rule). Some others will simply include your site once the fee is paid, many webmaster prefer this method because of it's fast inclusion.
Reciprocal
There is a mutual linkage between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic, the site submitting must place a link from their site before approval or inclusion. Please note this does not guarantee inclusion, beware of unscrupulous sites that approve your site then shortly thereafter remove your link.
Free
As the name implies these directories are free and do not require a link back, sometime these sites do get backed up, the higher the page rank, the more popular the directory is, so submission and approval periods may be long, but these free directories are by far the best in my opinion, unless your have the means of paying for your site submission.
Basically the benefits of any web directory is to provide your site with incoming links or reciprocal links a combination of the two links would be ideal in getting your site moved up in page rank. Getting your site indexed by spiders and search engines Bring targeted traffic to your website because visitors would already have an idea of what your site is about. Get higher ranking for targeted keywords. Help contribute to an increase in page rank.
Is the page rank of the directory you are submitting to important?
Well I will have to say, yes, but this must not be the only factor in your decision to use that directory, for instance a directory may have a low rank because its new, every website at one time or the other started off with a 0 page rank, if we were all to spurn a site because of a 0 PR then we'd all be out of business. Ultimately the decision is yours but a site should be judged by the quality of the sites it contains, back links and content.
Check Directories For
No Follow - there is a "no follow" tag associated with the link, meaning search engines will not follow the link.
Uses Redirects
Uses unscrupulous reciprocal methods- removing sites shortly after approving them to boost their own incoming links
Links embedded in JavaScript and other codes that search engines can't follow.
Submitting to web directories is not the only means of promoting your site or building back links but it is a very important one.
About the author:Karleen P. 32 yr female, located in Florida, USA. Web administrator of links-to-us.com
Getting your websites indexed quickly has always been a wide debate amongst the SEO experts.
“What is the quickest method to getting your website indexed?”
Some suggest placing your new website url on the front page of one of your high page ranked established websites.
Now this is great! If you already have an established website with a high google page rank. However, this isn’t practical for everyone. We don’t all have a high google page ranked website.
Another suggestion is… To buy a one way link from a page rank 6 or page rank 7 website for your new url.
This is expensive! Usually in excess of $100 for your link to appear on the high page ranked website for just one month!
Personally myself… I prefer free methods.
What I do to get my websites indexed quickly is this:
First, I go to the msn.com website.
I type my new URL into the search engine.
Usually it will show up as “address not found” (if it doesn’t then it is already indexed). Click on “send this address to us” and enter your url in to be crawled by the msn search engine.
Once I’ve done that, I then go over to the google search engine.
http://www.google.com/addurl/
And add my url there as well.
Usually msn indexes your website first, then google a couple of days later.
It won’t be long then till you are indexed in all the other search engines like: yahoo.com and so on.
All the best to you!
About the author:Joanne King Internet Marketing SEO Get 100 FREE Visitors to Your Website Everyday Easily & Quickly with “My MSN SEO Secrets”. Go directly to: http://www.msnseosecrets.com
How good is your website? Does it do its job? Is it effective? These are all good questíons that every business owner and marketing manager needs to ask him or herself. The website has become an essential tool for business. We all know we have to have a website, but are we using this venue to its greatest advantage? Most people responsible for their company's websites have stats packages and counters to tell them how many hits, how many unique visitors, where they are coming from, what their IP addresses are, what browser they're using, and of course the all important monitor resolution. So what! Who cares? The real question is do we have an effective website? Now if you have a transactional website, commonly referred to as an e-commerce site, you know the number of salës you are generating from your site, which is important, but do you really know how effective your site is? How many orders are you losing because of bad layout, awkward design, confusing navigation, and poor copy? How many potential clients have you chased away because you haven't put a telephone number on your site and an accessible real-person that can answer questíons? website is your business' public face. Big businesses can look like mom and pop operations and mom and pop operations can look like General Motors. The design of your website should not be taken lightly, its budget should not be an afterthought, and the designer you hire should be someone who understands more than code. Your Web-designer should be a multimedia-marketing advisor, someone who can counsel you how best to deliver your marketing message, and someone who can go beyond technical issues. You can spend a lot of monëy and have someone analyze your site for you, but are you really going to believe him, are you really going to act on their recommendations? You can't sell somebody something they really don't want - that may sound obvious, but believe me, salës people do it everyday. If you don't think you need a new website, you aren't going to spend the monëy to have one built. So the best way to tell if you need one is to analyze the one you already have, yourself. Below is a set questíons you can ask yourself. If you answer them honestly, you'll know whether you need a new site or not. After you've gone through the process, ask some colleagues to do the same. See if your answers compare 1. Does Your Website Have A Purpose? Every website should have a clearly defined purpose. Having a website just because everyone else has one is not an acceptable strategy. What is your website's purpose? a. Transactional sales-oriented site b. Customer service support site c. How to instructional site d. Product or service demonstration site e. Lead generation site f. Marketing, branding, positioning site g. Promotional campaign site h. Viral or buzz creation site 2. Is Your Website Focused? Too many businesses both large and small use their website as an information junkyard, a dumping ground for everything you do, everything you've done, and everything you ever thought of doing. This won't work. Customers are like children; they want clarity, direction, and unequivocal answers. Your website should be focused on a singular function. URLs are cheap, there is no reason you can't have different websites for every major thing you do, or every marketing campaign you initiate. How focused is your website? 3. How Functional Is Your Website? Everybody knows that websites should be easy to use, that you shouldn't have to drill-down too deep to find what you're looking for, and of course everything should work. Your website is a communication tool. If your website doesn't work properly, the only thing you're communicating is incompetence. How functional is your website? 4. Does Your Website's Construction Balance Competing Concerns? Websites by their very nature are a compromise of competing issues. Aesthetics, multimedia, frame construction, HTML, Flash, client-side, server-side, data bases, SEO tactics, information architecture, marketing communication, transaction efficiency all compete for precedence in the design of a site. Are you sacrificing clarity, focus, and communication for SEO tricks and unattainable traffíc numbers? Did you start with an IT solution like a database and build your site around a poorly conceived information delivery system. Does your website's design reflect your sites' defined business purpose or is it a result of secondary technical concerns? 5. Does your website honestly reflect your business personality? Does your website represent and promote your marketing objectives? Okay, this is a trick question for many small owner-managed businesses. Marketing is not salës. Marketing is about communicating who you are, what you do, and why you do it better than the other guy. Marketing is about image building, branding, and positioning, in other words, enhancing your business personality. Does your website honestly reflect your business personality? 6. Is your Web-presentation integrated into your overall marketing plan? Too many websites bear no relation to the rest of their business' marketing initiatives. Everything your company does should reflect an over-riding ethos, point-of-view, and personality. If your marketing collaterals don't match your website presentation, you are confusing your audience. Is your Web-presentation integrated into your overall marketing plan? 7. Is content king on your website? I once had a fairly large manufacturing client ask me to build a website based on a business card and ten 8x10 glossies of discontinued merchandise. This fellow was so paranoid that his competitors would see what he was doing that he hid his products from his customers. This business is now bankrupt. We've all heard the saying 'content is king'. Is content king on your website? Does your website adequately display and explain what you do, what products you sell, and what services you provide? Are there examples of your work? Are there testimonials from your customers? Have you provided information on how to order, how to use, and how to resolve problems? Is content really king on your website? 8. Is your website an experience? You watch television, you listen to the radio, you read a magazine, but you experience a website. Unlike other marketing vehicles, websites provide you the opportuníty to deliver your marketing message with the full complement of multimedia tools. Websites can stimulate all the senses, sight, sound, and interactive touch in order to communicate and connect with your audience. Websites are not brochures. Visitors shouldn't just see your website, they should experience it. Is your website an experience? 9. Does your website have a distinctive look? The notion of the flaming animated logo has become a clich� for bad design and style over substance, but that does not mean your website should be aesthetically boring and visually dreary. Your site should display clarity of vision; it should provide functional page layout; its use of colors, type, and static and kinetic visuals should be distinctive and purposeful. Your website should provide a defining "Look" that enhances your business personality. Does your website display a distinctive look that represents your business personality? 10. Do you list appropriate contact information on your website? I remember going to a meeting with a client who was in the construction business. The Vice President of the company was hopping mad. He demanded his email address be taken off the site immediately. He wasn't going to waste any more time dealing with client emails and inquiries. Websites are all about connecting you to your clients, not hiding from them. If you think you can put your website on autopilot and that a FAQ and Q&A are going to cut-it, you better think again. Does your website have adequate contact information? Do you list appropriate email addresses and telephone numbers for the people responsible for various aspects of your business? There you have it. Ten questíons that when answered honestly will tell you whether or not you have a website that works and whether or not you need to rebuild. About The Author:Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a Thornhill, Ontario based website design firm that specializes in delivering their North American clients' marketing messages using the latest audio, video, and interactive Flash presentation techniques to create compelling, informative and memorable Web-experiences that enhance brand personality and increase salës and profíts. Visit MRPwebmedia.com, 136Words.com, SonicPersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.
How to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Brand-New Website within 24 Hours
Posted by sushithmn Labels: website promotionYou may have just built a sparkling cool website, with all the money-making affiliate links plugged in, or just a simple website promoting your own business services.
Whether you are an internet newbie or experienced marketer, we all know that without traffic, even if your website is a knock-out, no one will ever get to see it and be wowed by it. But more importantly, no traffic equals no sales. Period.
When I first started out as an affiliate, I tried many means of advertising for my affiliate programs. I tried safelists, first submitting to them manually, then moved on to automated submission to zillions of them. I also bought leads for my MLM programs, supposedly good leads. Yes, I did make some sales and recruited some downlines, but the results are far from fantastic. And all these efforts are time-consuming and can be very expensive, and at times can be demoralizing. Imagine sending a powerful email advertisement to thousands of "so-called" quality leads and only hearing from a few of them. I forgot to mention about those cheap traffic offered on the internet. Many of them are just pop-over, pop-under ads which get "killed" by pop-killers.
If you had the same experience, there is a way out. With pay-per-click (PPC) search engines, you can now drive targeted traffic to your website. Never mind if it is indexed for ages or it is a brand new website created just minutes ago. Targeted traffic is worth a ton. You know that people who find your site are already interested in your product or affiliate program. This means higher conversions, and more sales. With a good product, good targeted keywords and a well-written ad, conversion can be in the range of 3 - 5 %.
Google and Overture are the biggest PPC search engines, with the largest network of engines. Setting up a campaign with Adwords will not take more than an hour if you have your keywords and ads ready. In fact, you will begin to see massive traffic streaming in as soon as 15 minutes after you set up your campaign. Yes, it will cost you more but you are only paying for relevant clicks, not for views/impressions. And the traffic is targeted and converts much better.
As a beginner in setting up PPC ad campaigns, it is good to start with smaller PPC search engines. The clicks there are cheaper, ie can be as low as 1 cent per click though traffic is generally lower. Examples of these search engines are Miva, GoClicks, 7Search.com, ExactSeek, etc. However, if your product is in a competitive industry, the amount of traffic offered by these search engines can add up pretty much.
Also, since they are relatively not as popular as the Big Two, there are some high traffic keywords that are still available for cheap clicks. These are gems to be discovered.
Here's my take on a few smaller PPC search engines:
1. 7search.com has been a leading ppc advertising network since 1999. It has been receiving mixed reviews from users. The one setback some users have feedback is its lack of Account Management Tools. However, it has also been reported that 7Search.com provides a rock solid customer support system with a guarantee that if their customer support does not respond to your email within 4 business hours, your account will be credited $1. Another unique feature is they will send you an email notification when a competitor outbids your top ranking keyword. The 7Search.com affiliate program also allows webmasters to share in the advertisement revenue. Recently, they have also added 37.com and MegaWeb.com to their stable of partner listings.
2. GoClick is an up and coming PPC that has received outstanding user reviews. The minimum bid price per click is only 1 cent. They are tied to over 60 distribution partners and generate over 300 million searches every month.Your advertisements will also be exposed to parts of the internet world that larger PPCs do not venture to.
So go ahead and try out some of these PPC search engines and start driving traffic within the next 24 hours.
The article does not seek to associate with and does not represent any of the above merchants or programs. Any mention of merchants or programs is for the purpose of illustration only.
This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author's name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.
About the author:Davion Wong is a prolific writer who has varied interest in different topics in life. Find out more about PPC advertising and how you can profit from pay-per-click affiliate programs such as 7Search.com affiliate program, Adsense, etc.
If you are looking for ways to promote your website, then web directories should definitely be considered a big part of your promotional plan. Web directories provide web visitors with a one-stop destination on the web to find the information they are looking for. Further, in using web directories, you can increase the visibility of your website and derive myriad benefits offered by web directories. Let's take a look at the benefits that webmasters derive from web directories 1. Some webmasters might wonder why they should bother to submit to web directories when 80% of all website traffic comes from search engines. The answer is simple when you consider the following: what about the other 20%? When you are attempting to maximize the traffic that comes to your website, every little bit of promotion helps and web directories can help you gain a big chuck of that 20% of web traffic you have been missing out on. 2. Did you know that a key factor in the ranking algorithm of search engines is link popularity? By using web directories you will be creating more links that point directly to your site and the raising your ranking in various search engines across the Internet. Further, everyone knows that a higher search engine ranking is equivalent to easier accessibility and easier accessibility equals more traffic for your website. 3. The first way to increase your link popularity is to include keywords in your hyperlinks. When you submit to web directories, the links you submit should not only lead to your site, but also should possess themed keywords within the links. The themed keywords will not only make your site easier to find, it will also increase the rating of your links in various search engines — again getting more, free web traffic for you. 4. Links that are created within web directories are votes for a site, and they use your keywords within your hyperlinks to associate your link with certain key phrases. As such, the keywords you select are extremely important because they determine how often your links will be pulled up whenever a key phrase is associated with your created links. Therefore, it is a good idea to research the most popular keywords associated with your website theme before submitting your website to various web directories: the most popular keywords can make all of the difference in the world. . If you are submitting to various web directories, there are a few things that you need to consider. First, for a directory to be valuable, the pages you submit your listings to must, at minimum, be listed in various search engines. For instance, if you submit your links to a web directory that doesn’t appear in any search engines, chances are web visitors will not only have difficulty finding your website, but they will also have extreme difficulty finding the web directory you have listed your site in. In such cases, the listing in the web directory is a fruitless endeavor. Conversely, if you list your web site in several popular web directories and you utilize keywords in your hyperlink and a short website description, you greatly increase the visibility and accessibility of your website. 6. The second consideration you must keep in mind when submitting to web directories is that when you are submitting your hyperlinks, you will derive the most benefit from submitting to directory pages that have a comparable theme to your website. For instance, if you have a website that is based on credit cards you will find that you get more web traffic from a web directory page that focuses on credit cards. Thus, when searching for web directories, look for web directories with topics that parallel the central focus of your website. 7. Here's a quick tip for you that can help you derive the most benefit from listing your hyperlink in web directories: watch out for Google Adwords because these are a good indicator of how Google at least categorizes the page. In other words, if you mirror your hyperlinks and descriptions to appear much like those seen in Google ads, you will more than likely increase your search engine ranking as well as your listing in various web directories. 8. In order to be successfully listed in any web directory, you will need to conform to the terms and conditions of the directory. Typically, web directories list a series of specific listing regulations that you must adhere to and it would pay for you to adhere to them. In addition, to improve the chances of your listing being accepted you should try to avoid promotional language and you should choose a category that is as close to your website theme as possible. 9. Webmasters have much to look forward to in terms of web directory posting. In fact, the next generation of web directories are now appearing that allow business card type pages. Not only do webmasters get the opportunity to post a short description of their website, but they are also afforded the opportunity to display their logo and contact information as well. Such offerings prove to be particularly appealing because eye catching logos and easy contact information will make a Webmaster's website that much more appealing. 10. In the end, web directories are a valuable part of your web promotional program and should not be overlooked in terms of their value. Along with the use of search engines, and article databases, a Webmaster can be pleasantly surprised at the free advertising available on the Internet. Finally, the increase in web traffic that webmasters reap can be truly astonishing indeed. About The Author:Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster of Indexplex a leading web directory.