SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

I just read the article about “factors determining a quality web directory” from Alive Web directory, and I have to rush here to write something about factors determining how much should you pay for a featured listing? In general, the higher quality of the web directory, the more you need to pay for a featured listing. Well, apparently a lot of directories owners can not fairly determine how much they should charge for a featured listing. So if you have enough time, search for directories that are undervalued and avoid directories that are over valued. There is no single factor determine how much a featured listing worth, but certainly the following list should give you an idea of how much roughly you should pay:

• The age of the directory - You probably all familiar with the term “Sandbox”. That’s right, if your site is new, who knows if you are serious about your site or you are just playing around? Thus, the newer the site, the less authority the site has. Take a look at how long has the directory been online. I would say when you pay over $10, make sure the site is at least 1 year old.

• Indexed pages with aging factors - Look at how many pages are indexed by Google and consider the age of the site at the same time. But don’t just look at the indexed page blindly. For example, if a site has been online for 1 year and have 1000 pages indexed and another site has only been around for 4 months and have 800 pages indexed already. I would say there is a good chance that latter is “cooler” than the first one.

• The number and quality of backlinks: Look a both the number of backlinks and quality of the backlink at the same time and remember, quality is more important than quantity. This is also a good chance for evaluating the potential of the directory. If the site has yet had a decent page rank but somehow has a lot of quality backlinks, then go ahead and pay for featured listing. Webmasters tend to set the price based on the pagerank, so the price is likely to be undervalued when the PR is low.

• How unique is each page: When I say how unique the page is. I mean look at the title of each page, the url of the page. Does the directory has some sort of paragraphs explaining the topics?

• What extras does the site provide for featured listing: 1. The featured listing should be placed above all the free ones 2. It is better if featured listing has special formating such as borders and different background colors. 3. It is better if featured listing gives you the chance to list your inner pages. This is very important for your inner page optimization. 4. Features such as reviews, comments and social bookmarking options provided on your featured details page.

• The function of the directory itself: If a web directory is soly a “directory” with only listings, then it won’t adds that much value to your site. It will be a bonus if the site has other features such as blog and forum so that there are always good content being added to the site which keeps the site itself fresh and it is likely that these types of directories will receive much more traffic than a normal directory without any additional features.

This is not strictly a penalty in and of itself, but it may be the result of one. Google stores its crawled
search data in two indexes: the primary index and the supplemental index. The supplemental index
stores pages that are less important to Google for whatever reason. Results from the supplemental
index typically appear at the end of the results for a Google query (unless the query is very specific),
and the results are marked as supplemental results.

Here is another great article about Google supplemental index you can look at.

Potential Search Engine Penalties
A penalized web site is much less likely to show up in a SERP, and in some cases it may not appear at all.
we will discusses the following areas:
- The Google “sandbox effect”
- The expired domain penalty
- Duplicate content penalty
- The Google supplemental index

The Google “Sandbox Effect”
Many search engine optimization experts hypothesize that there is a virtual “purgatory” that all newly launched sites must pass through in order to rank well in Google. In fact, many new sites seem to pass through this stage, and many find that the period is remarkably close to six months. Matt Cutts states in an interview with Barry Schwartz that there may be “things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries” (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002822.html). While Google may not explicitly have a “sandbox,” the effect itself is real. For this reason it is termed an “effect,” and not a “penalty.” It may be the collective side effect of several algorithms — not an explicit “sandbox algorithm.” Some sites seem to be exceptions to the rule, especially those that acquire links from several authority sites early on. A few links from CNN.com and other prominent web sites, for example, may exempt a web site from the sandbox effect. Some hypothesize that Yahoo! has a similar algorithmic factor, but that it is less severe and pronounced. MSN Search does not appear to have anything similar implemented.
The Expired Domain Penalty
Using a previously expired domain to launch a new web site used to evade this dreaded “sandbox
effect.” This was likely because Google was unaware that the site was new. Google put a stop to this
loophole a while ago, and now it seems to be quite the opposite situation at times. An expired domain name may now be subject to a temporary penalty. This is important, because it implies an additional delay before a site begins to rank well. In some cases Google will even refuse to index the pages at all during that period, leaving a web site vulnerable to content theft. It is also likely that Google devalues any links that are acquired before the re-registration of the domain. At the time of writing, other search engines do not appear to penalize previously expired domains.

Duplicate Content Penalty
Search engines attempt to avoid indexing multiple copies of the same content—duplicate content. Many
search engine optimization experts hypothesize that not only does a search engine not index such pages,
but it also penalizes a site for having the duplicated content. This is a subject of much debate, but in any case, having duplicate content will not improve the rankings of a site in any of the major search engines.

I don’t think anyone would do an excellent job on SEO without properly using SEO tools (they are free!). Here is a collection of SEO Tools you should be aware of and over time, you should be getting famiar with it and fully utilize it for your site’s optimization.

Code Validation: http://validator.w3.org/
This involves the validation of various HTML or XML standards, which are mainly governed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

Backlink Tool: http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/ | http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/site-analysis.html
Backlinks are inbound links that point to a certain website. They are required in order to get good rankings in the search engine results.

Google Sitemap: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Google Sitemap uses a xml format and it is a powerful tool for tracking how’s your site doing in Google

Robots.txt Tool: http://www.123promotion.co.uk/tools/robotstxtgenerator.php | http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html
Robots.txt is more important than you think. Make sure your site has it and it is in the right format. The first tool helps you generate a robots file while the 2nd checks if your existing one is valid.

Keywords Tools: Keywords Suggestion Tool | Google Keywords Suggestion | Meta Keywords
There are tools that will show you exactly what keywords are popular and give you suggestions based on a core keyword. It also gives you an idea as to what you can rank for and what you can’t. Some keywords are just too popular and therefore too difficult to get a good ranking for.

Keyword Density Analyzer: http://www.seobench.com/keyword-density-analyzer/
Keyword density is important since search engines use this information to determine the theme of your website, the perfect keyword density will help archive higher search engine positions.

Search Engine Ranking Check: Google Ranking | Yahoo Ranking | MSN Ranking
Look how your site rank for certain key phrases across various major search engines.

Website Optimization:
Meta Tag Generator | Spider Simulator | Similar Page Checker | Watchfire WebXACT
These tools in general can help optimize your site. Make sure that everything is up to par for the search engines can take a long time and often requires a lot of experience.

Google, Google, Google. To most of us, Google=Search Engine. It is right, if you have a website, what’s your mission? Maybe you want to make some money, or you want thousands of unique visitors every day? What it all comes down to is to be #1 on Google (right, I personally don’t really care about Yahoo and Live). If you go to a SEO forum, there are tons of threads and suggestions for ranking well on Google. Well, here is a list of things that I personally feel are on the top list of Google’s ranking algorithm.

1.  Title
No surprise here, page title, I just can not stress how important your page title is! Make your title descriptive and to the point.  Make sure it contains the exact key terms you are targeting. The position of your title tag could be important to, so make sure in your code, it is RIGHT under <head>.

2. Content
Content is  king  in Google’s eye.  Does your page have unique content that is useful to your readers? Think about the love that Wiki got from Google.  Well, I am not sure about you, I am jealous. Why can’t Google just love me the way it loved Wiki? So make sure each of your page has at least 200 words description. You don’t need to intentionally stuff keywords in there. If that is what your page is about, keywords will be used very naturally. A little bit of trick can be played here though. You can use proper headings and create  prominence (bold and underline your keywords)  in your on page description.  Keep your content updated regularly and keep it fresh. Google will love it.

3: Quality of backlink
When talk about links, I am not opposed of link exchanges as long as the site that links to you is trustworthy and the content is highly related to your site.  When acquire links, evaluate the site and ask these important questions:
1: Does the site linking to me has a lot of quality content?
2: Does the site linking to me provides extra “value” to my visitors?
3: Does the site linking to me is authoritative in Google’s eye? Further evaluate based on 3 criteria:
a- Look at how many pages are indexed by Google
b- Look at how many backlinks are counted by Google
c-  Look at the PR (some people’s favorite)
d- Look at the age of the domain

4. Internal Linking Structure
Some people actually ignored this factor. They seem only to know links from other sites are useful since one way link is so hard to obtain and we can do whatever we want with our internal linking structure. (Something that is hard to obtain is always better than something easy we can get).  Well, don’t ever overlook the importance of your internal links. In your content, link to your own page with the proper anchor text wherever is appropriate.  Say if you have a page ranked well for the term “computer motherboard”, in the content on that page, if you link to your page A using “Asus motherboard”, then the chance of your page A get ranked for “Asus motherboard” will be much greater than if otherwise.

5.  Time
Get top ranks on Google takes time! (unless you start with a blog and start to target a long tail niche keywords). Don’t ever expect your hard work would pay off any time soon. Patience is the key. Keep writing quality content, acquiring quality links instead of staring at your PR every day. At last pray!!

For a blog, an rss feed is a must have. It notifies your visitor whenever you updated your blog so that they can come back and see the “cool” things you just wrote about. Social bookmarking is another important area we should never overlook. With the feeburner rss, visitors like you can simply add yours to del.icio.us. The one thing that left for me to do is add Digg button to this blogger so that if there is anything I wrote that you think is pretty cool (I hope so) and want want to share with other people. Just in case you don’t know what Digg is, here is the definition taken from Wiki: Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

So here we go, I am tired of using Digg wordpress plugin so I just kept searching how to add Digg to your blog. Finally, here comes the solution:
simply copy this piece of code and put on your blog wherever you want to show it:
<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

That’s it, you are done!! If you want to do more with it, here is the other parameters you can change to personalize the button:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
digg_url = ‘your site’s url’;
digg_bgcolor = ‘#ff9900′;
digg_skin = ‘compact/icon’;
</script>
<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

these options are pretty much self-explanatory, if you omit the digg_skin, then it will set to default. Two options available for skin are compact and icon. Want to see how they look? Try it yourself on your blog!

I watched a cool video clip a couple of days ago talking about how to use Wiki kill your competitors. I think it is interesting so I am here to share with you guys.

Now let’s say you target a keyword  “loft bed” on your site. But after months (or even years?) of hard work, you had no luck. Other people somehow just do better than you and you will never find out exactly why they rank better than you. What do you do? This is where Wiki should kick in.

Find a wiki page with the term “loft bed”. If no such page exists, you will have to create one and this may take a bit longer for the “new wiki page” to beat your competitors. If the page already exists, then congratulations! Now add some good content to that page and properly use internal links link to other wiki pages.

You know what, Google just “love” Wiki page. They are non-commercial and is so informative. To Google,Wiki is the representative of “authority”. So once the wiki page get ranked the 1st and 2nd place, the guy, your enemy would lose a lot of visitors. If you ever try it out, never mention that you read it here please…

DirectorySEO.org today launched a new web directory: http://www.antiadbuster.com

Although it is a new directory, the domain has been registered for 5 years. Free submission will open for approximately 1 week. As usual, we will make it a search engine friendly web directory for webmasters. Moreover, we will apply strict rules to the submitted website, besides zero tolerance for any adult and gambling sites, any websites that are submitted without well-written description will be rejected and asked for improvement if possible. We want to make it a truly human edited, a spam free and a family-friendly web directory.

Since I had a blog, I have been trying hard to find ways to display my latest posts on my homepage. Firstly, it displays fresh content and thus SE should like it. Second, I want people to be able to see the latest posts without clicking to my blog page. I have been research on how to integrate wordpress but so far i had no luck with it. Today, when I playing around with feedburner, which in my opinion, is a must have tool if you have a blog on your site. If you have not had one, go here and sign up: http://www.feedburner.com

A live demo on my home page: SEO Directory HomePage

After creating your account, login into your members area and click on publicize tab, then select BuzzBoost:

Then all you need to do is to activate this service. Once the service is activated, you will get a piece of code. Before you copy and paste to your main.tpl file, you should set up some parameters first according to your own preferences.

I would also suggest you input some CSS style in your own stylesheet and overwrite the style provided by feedburner to match your site’s design. Here is a complete list of the class you can control:

Feed title: .feedTitle
Your post headline: .headline
Excerpt: div
The date: .date

You can also oeverwrite the displaying options by editing the <script> tag,
script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo-blog-directory?format=sigpro<addthings here to control>

For example, if you decide to high the title:
script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo-blog-directory?format=sigpro&displayTitle=false”

if you want the excerpt to display 30 words
script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo-blog-directory?format=sigpro&excerptLength=30″

You can get a complete instruction on feedburner on apply your own the styles.

There are a lot of mods available online telling you how to add a thumbnail to your details page. One of the most popular ones is to add a Alexa thumbnail to your detail page. Well, there is another way to do this. Usually when a listing becomes featured listing, a thumbnail shows automatically. Thus, if we look the featured listing tpl file - f.link.tpl (different templates could have different file names for featured listing), we can see a piece of code like this:
<img src=”http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r={$link.URL|escape}

That’s right, it is the code that display a thumbnail for your featured listing. Now you can copy and paste this code to your detail listing template file - detail.tpl. you may try it a couple of times to make sure it displays at the right position on your detail page.

A live demo here : detail page with thumbnail