How I do Directory Submissions

March 8th, 2008 by Chris

Submitting to directories is one of the most straightforward ways to build links to your websites, however such a practice is not without problems, there is a prevalence of small directories and directory operators who mainly exist to swindle you. For instance a directory operator may constantly launch new directories, focusing all the PageRank they have on the new ones, to make it look like an attractive submission, then eventually they may get banned for manipulating PageRank etc, or submissions dwindle, and they open a new one, forsaking the old one. Meaning, that nice listing you paid for, quickly evaporates.

Directories alone also cannot be your only link building endeavor, you need other types of links as well, that being said, here is how I go about doing directory submissions.

There are three prime directories every site needs to consider.

DMOZ, the poorly managed free directory. It can take months or years to get in, and then a competitor who is a directory editor can just remove your listing or not approve it to begin with. There have been cases where even higher up DMOZ editors (so-called “meta editors”) were corrupt in this way. Still, every new site should be submitted. You just cannot count on it.

Yahoo, the premier pay directory, has vastly dropped in importance due to Yahoo’s own decisions to devalue and de-emphasize their directory in their search results and throughout their site. Meaning less and less traffic browses their directory than what used to. They also charge a yearly fee, not a one-time fee, of $300 a year. So, in order to submit to them you need make sure you will earn at least $300 a year directly off the traffic & link benefits you gain from the directory listing. In general I consider listings for sites whom I think can be rewarded with an increase of at least $10 a day through higher traffic. I know, an actual positive ROI would be around $1 a day, but there are other methods for raising traffic than a Yahoo submission, that would give a much better ROI, so the gains in my mind have to be substantial to justify it.

Best of the Web, what I consider the last of the top tier directories, has the benefit of being very similar to Yahoo, but better in that they have one time fee submission options. With a one time fee submission you have 5 years, 10 years, to make up the cost, it is much easier to justify than Yahoo’s yearly fee (BOTW also has a yearly fee option). BOTW has been around nearly as long as Yahoo as well, and throughout the directory PageRanks are very close. They have less traffic than Yahoo of course, but they are much cheaper too. By the way, BOTW has a coupon going on till the end of this month for $25, that makes a one time fee listing about half as much as Yahoo’s yearly fee. Coupon Code: SAVEBIG.

After those I go down a tier to secondary directories which are valid directories, and so I do not worry about then losing their ability to pass PageRank, but on the other hand they do not contribute large amounts of traffic. These are JoeAnt.com and especially GoGuides.org and I tend to regularly get submissions from them.

For a new site that is typically all I’ll do. If you can afford it, patient SEO is usually best. I never want to do too many directory listings at the same time. So I’ll wait a few months and see where I’m at and if I’m not pleased with the progress I’m making in the SERPs, I’ll do a few more submissions.

For these additional submissions I scour sites like ISEDB.com and DirectoryCritic.com looking for quality pay directories. I tend to only look for pay ones. Free ones I’ll find by doing backlink searches on my competitors and submit to them that way. Free ones that my competitors aren’t in tend to not be worth it so I don’t bother. Reciprocal link free ones are never worth it, you never want to link to a potential bad neighborhood, and just generic free ones can end up being covered in so much spam it is doubtful the link helps much at all.

So I focus on paid ones, and when looking for them I check the following criteria.

  • If I see any sort of spammy sites in it, I move on.
  • I check the PageRank, Google cache, and backlinks of both the homepage and the subcategory I will be submitting to. A blank in any of these isn’t an automatic disqualifier (except cache, no cache, no submission), pages at Yahoo and DMOZ will show blanks sometimes for PageRank or backlinks, but not having these things does weigh against the directory. Also, for the homepage, make sure the backlinks don’t look artificially generated.
  • If the site loads slowly, looks unprofessional, is buggy, or otherwise looks amateurish, I move on.
  • I check the whois of the site to see who owns it, I do reverse searches to see other sites owned or on the same server. If I find a directory that is owned by someone who owns a dozen directories, I move on because of the risks I outlined at the start of this post.
  • I check compete.com and alexa.com to see traffic data.

This, like thinking of Yahoo is worth it for your site, is all very much a judgment call, but I think it pays to be picky. In the end I probably pass on 10 directories before finding one I’ll submit to, then I tend to submit at least 3 different sites if I find one I like.

The point being, link building is as much about your site’s reputation as your site’s rankings, and I think being discriminating in your submissions is a good thing and will help make sure you do not over do things and trip any present or future filter or penalty.

So I’ll do around 3 or 4 submissions for a site, and again, stop for a few months to see where I am at (stop with directory submissions, not necessarily all link building). Slow and steady, but reliable. If you can afford to be patient, be patient. There is nothing worse than racing to the top with shadier impatient methods only to fall back to oblivion thanks to a penalty or ban shortly after you get there.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 10 Comments »

User Tracking Isn’t So Bad

February 21st, 2008 by Chris

There has been much privacy broohaha for the past years about privacy and user tracking. Specifically how ad companies will “track” users across websites.

This, I think, has mostly been overblown, and really, is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I’m taking my wife to Vegas this Spring and these past two weeks I’ve been booking our trip and shopping for clothes. The evil ad company has profiled me, undoubtedly with the help of the evil travel website, and now on many sites I’m getting ads for… Las Vegas coupons and hotel deals! The nerve of those people to give me special offers and more targeted advertising just because they know I’m going to Vegas. I’m so offended!

Seriously though, they don’t know that I, Chris Beasley, tall goateed man, is going to Vegas. They know that user 897987 or user with ip of 333.444.555.666 is going to Vegas, and so, they’re showing this anonymous user appropriate ads. Sure, the travel website I booked with knows my personal information, but they don’t (and more importantly, don’t need to) share it with their ad partners. They just need to share a cookie, a small anonymous marker, and or my IP.

I’ve also been shopping on Bluefly.com for hot dresses for when I take my wife out at night. So what do I see on some sites now? Ads for 10% off my next purchase at Bluefly. The horror! Again, sure, Bluefly knows my personal information, but they don’t need to share it for this tracking to work, they just need to set a cookie or give my IP to the ad network.

As a consumer, I like this personalization and customization of the ads I see. I’d much rather see an ad for 10% off a store I might buy actually from, rather than an ad to download a smiley screensaver. I don’t feel creeped out about tracking because I know I’m just an arbitrary number to them, like just another box in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As a website publisher, this kind of advertising excites me and makes me feel good about the future of online advertising. In the February 18th issue of Fortune there was an article about one of the largest ad buyers in the world and how he is both impressed with and encouraged by the tracking ability of the web (and so spending more money on Internet advertising) as well as how he wants to port that same type of targeting to TV, if possible. So, really, this kind of tracking and targeting of advertising is what brings the big money to play on the Internet, making it important for every publisher.

Unfortunately, public perception of the negativity of such advertising persists, we all need to do our part to help our industry by educating, friends, family, and customers, as to the true value of these tracking systems.

Posted in: Ad Networks, General by: Chris | 2 Comments »

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for 44b

February 1st, 2008 by Chris

Read it up here.

Honestly, I don’t understand this move.

Yahoo sucks. Their search engine sucks, their advertising service sucks. Who here doesn’t think Microsoft Adcenter is better than Yahoo Search Marketing? I believe until just very recently YSM didn’t even allow you to opt out of their syndicated results, so to advertise on their search results you had to deal with a ton of spammy clickfraud like clicks.

Personally, MSN traffic converts better for me than any other search engine, I think their Adcenter program is well run, and I also think their search is better than Yahoo’s.

Granted, Yahoo has many other properties (Rightmedia, Flickr, etc), and Yahoo’s horrible performance over the past few years has hammered that stock and made it very cheap, but still, I feel MS had turned a corner as far as catching up goes and they could have had all of Yahoo’s market position without paying for it.

This is big for our industry of course. It would mean that those hoping MS would be able to offer an alternative to Adsense (in every way) will be disappointed since undoubtedly they’ll keep that comedy of errors that is YPN (read more about the joke that is YPN.)

Also, consider history. Yahoo gobbled up Overture, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. Supposedly combining the best features of all of those sites (results to be determined), and now Microsoft wants to gobble up it all.

This will mean one less bit of diversity in our businesses, both in advertising and in SEO, and that I dislike. Additionally, what kind of pressure is this going to put on ASK.com? That will be interesting to see.

Posted in: Ad Networks, General, Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 7 Comments »

To our hosts and registrars, may they never meet

January 21st, 2008 by Chris

This post, I’m sure, will have many of you saying “Duh!” and rightfully so, most of you, I hope, know this, or realize it is common sense, but many people out there don’t and they get misled, confused, and screwed because of it.

I speak of course, of bundled services where your registrar is your host or your host is your registrar. For beginners this can be very attractive, one less thing to worry about, don’t have to learn about the NS stuff, you just tell your host what domain you want and they set it all up for you.

The problem is that, in most such circumstances, the legal owner of the domain ends up being the host, not you, and so if you ever want to move hosts (and everyone moves hosts eventually) you will not be able to, or you’ll have a hard time doing it.

This recently came up in the forums and the poster said he had 5 months of site downtime thanks to his host not releasing his domain. Unfortunately his experience is rather common, I hear about similar things once a month or so, and so, I felt this issue needed a big underline drawn beneath it (hence, this blog post).

Downtime is expensive, not only are you losing the direct income from the lost traffic, but indirectly you’re also hurting your long term promotional and SEO goals by being offline. The risk of downtime is far more expensive than the slight added cost of choosing not to take up your host or registrar on that bundled offer.

Your host is for your web space, and that is it, I would not use them for anything else. Your registrar is for your domain, and that is it, I would not use them for anything else. Even bundled design services, they may say that you cannot transfer your site off if you used them to get a design done.

No, keep everything separate.

Posted in: Website Management by: Chris | 1 Comment »

My New Nutrition Site

January 16th, 2008 by Chris

I finally have something to blog about, after awhile of not getting any inspiration. I’ve finally launched a new site (more or less).

Nutriquiz.com a nutrition quiz site.

I am really into nutrition, both as I like to cook and I like to look good naked. So I’ve been “into” nutrition for awhile and was hit with a little inspiration last Spring. People are dumb, especially when it comes to food. Most people have no idea what food is healthy or not. Oh, they have ideas, but in general they haven’t a clue, or they don’t think about the issue enough. People think muffins are healthier than doughnuts because they contain fruit, or they think that chicken parmesean is healthier than a grilled sirloin steak because it has been so ingrained in their head that chicken is good and beef is bad. Food that is often marketed as healthy, often has as much added sugar as a candy bar, and food that is traditionally seen as unhealthy, isn’t always that bad.

I also had the idea that people learned the best through questions. If you tell someone something, okay, they hear you, but maybe they don’t fully comprehend, maybe it goes in one ear and out the other. If you ask them a question you force them to engage their brain and think about a topic. So, in that regard, I think a quiz format such as on my site is the best way to teach people, hence the goal of the site is to change the way people think about food, by making them use the same critical thinking skills they use when picking a quiz answer to make healthy choices when eating at restaurants or doing grocery shopping.

Of course, the site also has the goal of making me money. I feel though that by having a non-monetary goal helps all aspects of managing the site. If my goal is not just to make money, but to teach people and make the site easy and usable, hopefully that shows through and in the end results in greater success.

I hired Brainyminds, (you may know them as Stymiee and Ses5909) to do this site for me, and I gave them the goal of making it very Web 2.0-ish in design, and I’m quite pleased with the look and feel. This is my first truly Web 2.0 site and so everything about it was made from a standpoint of viral marketing and community involvement.

The site also includes a full nutritional database, but unlike typical such sites out there that use Brute Force SEO combined with a public domain nutrition database to gain traffic, I made the conscious decision to not do that, to not put the database in a browsable format. The goal here is to promote the quizzes, and I did not want to do anything that could perhaps end up hurting the site (duplicate content and all that). We’ll see if it pays off.

So, what makes this site good from a money making standpoint? Well, obviously the subject matter is good as it gets high paying advertisements and CPM rates. The weight loss field in general gives some of the best eCPM rates on the Internet.

Then there is the content of the site. The content is just simple quizzes, which I make up. It isn’t super easy to think of new quizzes, but neither is it super hard, and all the rest of the content is provided by users. Once I reach a critical mass of quizzes, I will have to do almost no work on the site other than simple moderation. Also, as far as my workload goes, I have a really fancy and easy to use backend with the site that makes managing/adding quizzes a breeze.

Finally, there is the interactive nature of quizzes themselves. By engaging the user in a test like a quiz you increase the page-views-per-visitor metric, which can result in an increase in ad revenue. Additionally you appeal to their competitive side which should, hopefully encourage them to share quizzes with their friends.

I’m hoping all of those factors come together into a perfect storm for this site, and ideally eventually some large company will wish to buy it from me for a large sum of money, but even if that doesn’t happen I could see this site becoming one of my top earners.

For other publishers, I think this site offers a great example of a way to be a website publisher when you’re not actually publishing any actual content. Not every site has to be article driven (and yes, I have a few articles on this site), or made with public domain or bought content, or any of the other typical strategies. You can build a site around a service, or some sort of interactive activity, and do just as well or better.

I also think it is a good example of how to swing for the fences. I paid programmers/designers better than myself to do this, because I wanted something better than what I could produce. I’m using bought stock photos for the quizzes, I added many additional little usability features, and I made sure everything was done to a high standard. Even though I’m a little guy, my goal here was to make the site look like it was run by a bigger company.

There are still some changes and tweaks to make of course, some minor additions, and I need to add dozens and dozens more quizzes, but the work is mostly done, and the site is ready as this point for public use. If you have any comments or suggestions (or quiz ideas) I’d appreciate the feedback.

Posted in: General, Website Management by: Chris | 11 Comments »

Google and Meta Tags

December 4th, 2007 by Chris

For years I’ve taken the stand that Google doesn’t use meta tags for ranking purposes. Going back to 2001 I’ve always said that Google will sometimes use the meta description tag for generating a site abstract for the SERPs, but not for ranking, and the meta keywords tag is not used at all.

Not only have I told people that going on 7 years now, but I also did experiments showing it to be true, and yet still I would get into forum arguments on the topic, quite heated ones, and even one time someone who runs a webmaster site made a page on his site, calling me out by name, more or less calling me an idiot for believing what I did.

It is nice to be right. Like I said in my intro to my new SEO guide I have a really good track record of being right with things involving SEO, and this very literal post by Google confirms the meta tag issue in my favor very handily.

You’d think that since this “discussion” started in 2001 it would have ended by now, but it hasn’t. Only instead of me putting on the boxing gloves to teach the SEO neophytes over at SitePoint, John Conde has been doing it instead. The threads about meta tags still come up though, hopefully, now, they stop.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 7 Comments »

Sometimes even I do dumb things

November 29th, 2007 by Chris

My second most popular content site is my survival site.

I get really decent eCPMs from Adsense with it, especially this time of year, because there are a lot of outdoor retailers who do typical Christmas advertising. Yesterday was one of the best normal days ever for Adsense with it in fact, I saw normal days because abnormal days when I was on the frontpage of Digg or in USA Today, etc, were of course so high in traffic that earnings were way up.

I’ve had this site since 2001 and one of the main draws on it, responsible for getting me tons of links and media mentions like the aforementioned ones above, is the quiz. It features 21 questions and a snarky Sergeant who insults the quiz takers both before, during, and after the quiz. One of the main reasons I made this quiz was to increase pageviews per visitor by making everyone who takes the quiz generate atleast an additional 21 page views. It works beautifully for that purpose and so makes up half of all pages view on the site (not counting the forum).

However, here is the dumb thing, I’ve only ever run 1 banner ad on the page, despite it being such a large portion of my page views. Since 2001, just 1 banner ad. How much money have I left on the table? Who knows, but I did just now add a new footer Adsense ad. It’ll be interesting to see how much this ad position makes me, but I’d guess it could almost do as much as $1000 per month. Wish I had thought to do that sooner.

Let this be a lesson for those of you like me with many different sites, be constantly reviewing them for better ways to monetize them.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | No Comments »

Using Google Alerts to Monitor Your Business

November 28th, 2007 by Chris

Google has a very nice, yet I think unsung feature, called Google Alerts which makes it very easy to monitor aspects of your web business. It isn’t a new service, and if you’re a dedicated reader of this site and forum you’ve undoubtedly heard it mentioned before, but I don’t think I’ve ever spotlighted it and it certainly does deserve some spotlight.

So, how Google Alerts works is you basically feed in search phrases and every time a new result is found matching that phrase, Google will email you (you can also ask it to just send you daily or weekly digests).

So, you can input your name or your company name and find when someone says something about you or when something is attributed to you. You can also use this as a tool to detect copyright infringement. Sometimes people who copy articles leave bylines intact and so you can search for elements of those bylines and be notified when your articles are copied.

You can also use this to be notified when Google finds new incoming links pointing to your site. Not only is it useful to get a quick listing of those links without having to check your log files, but it also clues you in on when Google does backlink updates since you’ll suddenly get a few alert emails about new links.

Finally, you can just as easily monitor your competitors (or even businesses you have stock in), as well as monitor your own websites.

The cost for this service? Nothing, quite a deal huh?

Sure, there are other ways to do this same thing, for instance the spam-filled technorati, but since most of us doing website marketing are concerned mostly with Google getting the results directly from them provides greater value in my opinion.

So, if you haven’t started using Google Alerts yet, and I’m sure many of you already do use it, take some time right now and setup a few.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization, Website Management, Website Promotion by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Prepare for an Adsense eCPM Drop

November 16th, 2007 by Chris

As per this post at the official Adsense blog Google has now significantly reduced the amount of space in an ad that is clickable. Now only the title and URL of an Adsense ad will be clickable. The reason they say is to reduce accidental clicks.

I do not like this change. The thing is, Google created this type of advertising, they have been the standard, and surfers are probably used to their ads to the point where now they know they don’t need to click on the title or URL, just on the ad itself. This would only then confuse surfers.

Oh I agree that maybe reducing accidental clicks will increase advertisers value and raise rates, but that is a very long process to deal with and it doesn’t tackle the real problem sucking down advertiser value, MFA sites. In the meantime we’ll all have to tighten our belts I think.

A reasonable compromise would be to make all the text of an ad clickable and merely leave the whitespace (which is currently clickable) non-functional. That way users can click on the title, the text under it, or the URL, and be taking to the advertiser’s website.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 10 Comments »

Another Day, Another Death Threat

November 7th, 2007 by Chris

This is a dangerous profession we’re in I guess.

A few years ago on my literature site forum there was a problem member, he was banned a few times, would reregister, I’m sure all the forum admins who read this know the type I’m talking about. One of the things I’d do to find his new accounts was look for some tell tail signs in PMs. Unfortunately one of the PMs I found said he was going to drive down to my house and burn it down. This was of course exacerbated by the fact that, unlike most visitors to my websites, this guy lived closed to me, 30 minutes away, the next big town over. So, while he was just a troubled kid (around 14 I recall) he might have been crazy enough to do it. I filed a police report and he ended up getting a visitation from his local police about it.

This morning I awoke to a similar problem on my survival site forum. A member had been very nasty to another member, completely uncalled for, and was banned by my moderator. He then proceeded to reregister and use proxy servers and post dozens of hate threads, probably hoping to make a lot of work for me or the moderator. Luckily vbulletin has nice mass moderation tools now so it was a quick fix, then I banned him and all his IP addresses, I also caught him reregistering one more time and got that account banned.

He called here a little bit ago and left a death threat on my answering machine. I don’t know if this guy is psycho or what, but I take all such things seriously. So I’m filling out a police report on it and we’ll see if they can’t send someone over to talk to this guy too.

One of the problems is of course WHOIS data. As a webmaster who publishes original content I hate false whois data because it makes it harder for me to pursue those who steal content. On the other hand with all the wackos out there the anonymous whois data is looking more and more worth it. Sure, most of these people are just blowing off steam, but it only takes 1 to be an actual wacko.

Anyone else ever have this happen, or am I the only one?

Posted in: General by: Chris | 9 Comments »

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