For online businesses, everybody wants to be the first on search engines in order to have more exposure than anyone. So far, no matter how much SEO work you do on your website, it never seems to be enough. Among other things, we all know that search engines rankings are related with numbers of backlinks, which are links pointing back to your website.

There are many seo services that let you increase the number of backlinks of your website, but one of the most commons consist in something called directory submission, which you can submit your site to website directories. The good thing is, that you will get many backlinks pointing to your website, helping to improve your search engine rankings… The bad side of many website directories are the super-slow process, which makes you wait months until get reviewed and approved by the directories, and that’s a terrible problem when you want almost immediate results.

After continuing with this article, let’s explain what’s a website directory:

A website directory is usually defined as an alphabetical list of names and addresses for example Yellow Pages, other types of telephone directories and address books.  The online directories contain the names of websites and their URL’s.

Introducing Fast Approval

Fast Approval is a fast and easy way to get a fast review of your directory submission, within 7 days or less. This service is divided in two: Directory Owners and Directory Submitters.

Directory owners can earn cash for each submission made to their directory! Each submission will need to be reviewed by each owner within 7 days for you, in order to earn the submission fee. It’s really important to remark that if you (as owner) don’t approve a listing after 7 days, any fees will be refunded to the original website submitter.

It also offers to automatically post the new listings for you, by uploading the ResellerGo API file straight to your directory. Afraid of using its API? Don’t worry, you will always have complete control to what is published in each of your directories.

Directory submitters can use the ResellerGO control panel to get their website reviewed within 7 days! They provide reports within your account that displays the status of your submissions and also the link to each listing after it has been approved. Keep in mind there is a minimal one time fee for fast approval that is less than what most directories charge for a fast review. Remember that if you haven’t been reviewed within 7 days, your fee will be refunded automatically in the system.

How much it cost?

That’s a good question. May be you should be thinking that it’s fairly expensive because of its effectiveness but it’s not, you need to pay as low as $0.5 per approved listing!.

How long does it take to get listed on a directory?

Certain directories allow you to get your website listed almost immediately. Other directories take much more time but generally few directories take longer than 4 weeks before your website gets the necessary approval to be listed.

Screenshots of Fast Approval

Fast Approval

Fast Approval for Submitter

Submission Center

URL Submission Panel

As you can appreciate in the screenshots, this service is very easy to use, allowing you to do something tedious in very simple steps, just with a few clicks!.

Benefits of using Fast Approval

As you can notice, it’s not a common url submission service. It’s called fast approval because you can submit your website to about a 1000 directories in 30 minutes. Generally the free services are much slower than the paid ones…

As you may know, the higher the PR the higher the ranking. WIth this tool you can easily submit your website to a directory with a specific Page Rank, PR range or alternatively a mix of PR ranges, It all depends on your preferences.

So if you feel an urgency of improving your search engine rankings quickly, you can try this service to achieve that goal – It has different packages and surely you will find something that fit your necessities.

Every time we want to create a website, we think about the sources of traffic. In my case, the most of my traffic comes from other sites, such as blogs and social media networks. In the case of search engines, I have noticed that I received many visits through the keyword “canonical url” due to a post that I wrote many time ago.

No matter what, the fact is that getting indexed and raking high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others, is a must if you want to get tons of traffic through them.

As you may know, this is very related with the Meta Tags you use, something that I have explained in other post but I will retook in this post.

Submitting your website on Search Engines

The only way you will make money with your website is attracting visitors to it! Understanding by website a blog, forum, social media or anything else. You won’t magically get money with your website if people don’t see what you are offering. Of course you can attract visitors with PPC, paid advertising or blog reviews, but in this post we will deal with search engines.

There are 4 main search engines that you should submit your website on:

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
• dmoz: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

I will tell you the truth, the only search engine which you should submit your site on is dmoz. If you use the form to apply for the other 3 ones you will be wasting your time. Why? Because everybody submits its websites through that forms and there are big lists of websites waiting months to be indexed. There are other way to get indexed by those search engines without using its forms .

For example, getting backlinks from websites that are already indexed can help you a lot, because all these search engines are constantly sending their spiders to scan every website they have indexed. So when they scan a website which is not listed in their databases, they have a mechanism that put you in automatically. So if you think to launch a new blog for example, try to get some backlinks from sites related with yours and this way, you will get indexed very fast. When I launch this blog, I applied the technique that I’m sharing with you know and I get indexed in less than 24 hours .

Build a Search Engine-Friendly site

The main difference of ranking among the millions of websites listed by search engines is because ones are more friendly than others to search engines. What do I mean by? Everything in your website has an impact on your ranking. Websites with many images and few text are terrible for SEO, how they pretend to be analyzed by search engines? I know they have complex algorithms but it’s not so advanced! In the other hand, websites with less dynamic structures and more rich text are easily indexed by search engines, websites with headers, the footers, xml feeds, alt tags on images, titles on their links and that kind of things.

Keep in mind that search engines cannot red the following information:

• Multimedia files like Flash or words within images.
• Content in frames.
• Content on dynamic pages.

The last point has changed a little with the passing of time, because if you think about the case of the blogs, unless you force them to create a static page, your content will be created on dynamic pages. Nevertheless, using static or dynamic pages your content will be read and recognized by search engines without problems.

In the case of images and links, remember to add an alt tag and a title, search engines register that kind of things when they send their spiders, also know as crawlers or robots.

Optimizing your website for Google

As we know, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to determine the rank of a website, and reason of that is simple. Among other reasons, they do this basically to prevent big sites from dominating results permanently. So as you can imagine, optimizing your website for Google could be a hard task because they are shaking the things constantly.

Google bases its algorithm starting from keywords. So I recommend you to check my preview post Finding Good Keywords For Your Website in order to know more about this topic. The fact is that PageRank equation is a big mystery, no one knows with exactitude which are the components which help you to have a higher rank, but there are some hints which appear to have an extra value on the formula:

• Inbound  Links from related sites with high PR.
• Inbound  Links from blogs.
• Inbound Links from .edu, .gov or .org.
• Outbound Links to high-ranked relevant websites.
• The size and quantity of information on your site.
• A Google Sitemap. You can generate one for WordPress by using this plugin, or by visiting this site.
• Updated content.
• Visible Title and Alt Tags.
• Using keywords on your Heading tags, bold and italicized words.
• Site traffic.

Optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN

As you could see in the preview part of the post, Google focuses its attention mainly on inbound links, or links that point back to your site. In the case of Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, they seem to emphasize on Meta Tags.

Meta Tags appear at the beginning of the source code of your website, in the <head> section. They provide information about your site to the browser and search engines, and the most important of them are:

• The Title
• Page Description
• Keywords

The Title can be set by using the HTML code <title> and it sets the title of your website, being this the text which the browser will display when someone visits your site.

The Page Description can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“description” content=“Your site description here” /> and basically this is the text that search engines will show when someone find your site through they.

By the way, the second one is the result showed by Yahoo! and It seems that it’s not updated…

The Keywords tag can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword1, keyword2, keyword 3…” /> and it lists the relevant terms for a website. Remember that it is really important to set only relevant keywords or you could get slapped by search engines! Also, I recommend you the following things in order to optimize your website for any search engine:

• Try to keep your keyword list under 20 elements. I know it could be hard, in fact I’m using like 40 now, but once you see which keywords are converting are which not, you should eliminate them from the list.
• Long Tail Keywords or keyword phrases are more useful that a single word. Basically this is because the competition and the macro-view, the more specific you are with your keywords the higher will be your rank.
• Do not include articles or prepositions ( a, an, the, on, from, by…). They are not necessary.
• Use lowercase in your keywords. If you capitalize them, capitalization will be required for match.
• Plural words include the singular ones when they are in the same root. For example, the keyword roots includes root, but companies does not include company.
• Phrases include the same words without spaces, i.e. make money online includes makemoneyonline but not vice versa.

Remember that when you use phrases, search engines try to match your keywords with the search manipulating your keyword, i.e. inverting it, mixing it…

What about dmoz?

This is The Open Directory Project from directory.mozilla.org, and it is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

It also feeds its results to Google, AOL and other directories of the web, spreading your website through many sites if you are listed there.

Once your submitted your site to dmoz it will be study. They don’t accept all the sites, you need to cover some requirements and possibly you will be rejected at the first time. Just remember to add your URL in the right category, this is a really important factor which helps you to get in, because if you are a little away from your path, you will be rejected automatically.

To Conclude

It is vital for a website to be indexed by search engines in order to get targeted traffic and attract new readers or customers. I encourage you to check my other post related with keywords and SEO in order to complement the extensive information provided in this post. I hope you like the tips! if you have any special thing that you want to share feel free to leave a comment!

Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.

Nowadays, almost every time you read a blog article you can find links pointing to other articles of the same blog. Internal linking is one of the most common strategies used by bloggers in their posts due to several reasons, which I’m going to explain in this post in order to let you know the secret behind this behavior.

Have you asked to yourself what happens with your old posts? And when I say “old” I want to refer to the posts you have published months ago… Well, let’s say that your visitors use to share your posts through social media networks, getting that post a good exposure and being a boom for some days. A week after, that post won’t be read with the same frequency which people read it in its first days with. Of course, if you do a good SEO you will attract visitors to that post through search engines, but it won’t be the same.

So there are other strategy which you can use in order to enhance the traffic of your posts, and that strategy is called Internal Linking.

The Advantages

What do you win by linking past posts? A lot! and I’m going to explain you why. If someone visits your blog for first time, you would like to make it subscribe to your blog right? Many times happens that people visit your blog and if they don’t like the first content they read, they just leave without reading anymore. If you link other related articles inside your posts, people will click all those links and this way, they will read more content of your blog.

Tip: is very important to use the attribute target=”_blank” in order to force that links to open in a new tab/window of the browser.

The problem is when you link many posts inside other ones, because the user will click all of them and then they won’t know what to read first. Sometimes that happens to me, I end with 4 or 5 articles of the same blog opened in my firefox and it could be hard to find a chronological order.

So once you learned that, let’s review the main advantages of internal linking:

• Promote your other posts.
• Make your visitors stick to your blog.
• Increase the possibility of getting new subscribers.
• Increase the number of backlinks pointing to your blog.
• Increase your ranks (pagerank, alexa…) because of the backlinks.

The Disadvantages

I think there are no disadvantages on this topic. Well yes, it is very important to remember that you should not bombard the users with plenty of internal links in your posts. As I said before, they could get bored or they couldn’t find an order among the posts you are linking, and this could end with a confused user closing all those posts that you linked. This way, you could get the opposite effect that you wanted to get which was the catch of a new subscriber…

Conclusion

Certainly linking other own articles in your posts can be a good idea to make your readers stick to your blog. Something you need to remember is to don’t bother them with several links, I suggest you to link 1 may be 2 posts and not more than that. More than 2 posts could result a negative reaction, and you don’t want to frighten your visitors . Any suggestions? Feel free to leave your comment and help this community to grow up!

Nowadays, many of the good domain names are already taken on Internet. Many people buy domains just for reselling and not for personal use, people who make shorter the list of good available domains.

I remember when the .me was launched, I wanted to buy some names to work with in the future. The problem was that many of those good names were already bought, and remembering a specific case, I found a good domain which I decided to buy and just then I press the button to buy it -after entering all my information related with my credit card- I got owned, someone bought that domain seconds before me.

But why that kind of competition? First of all, to understand the reason of these competition for the good names, you need to know what is considered a good domain name.

What is the first thing you notice when you type an url in the browser? In effect, the very first thing you notice (may be unconsciously) when you do that, is the length of that url. If the url is too large (20 characters or more) the people can forget it because of its complexity. Even a string of 15 characters are considered as long by me. So the best thing you can try to find is very short domains, strings which less than 15 characters would be fine. In my case, I have just 6 characters on my domain name, but what’s the advantage of having a short web domain?

People tend to remember catchy and short words faster than long ones. If you think about it, you will remember faster a word with 2 3 or up to 4 syllables  than a word with more than 4 syllables. But besides having a short name, you should also look for simplicity. What if you choose a string of 6 characters but all of them are random letters? i.e. jahsdjsjdg.com, khaslkdh.net…. Could you remember that? So lesson two, you should use a simple domain name, something that you can spell and remember without problems.

Many people tend to include keywords in the domain, which is not bad. In fact, it is a very good way to rank higher on search engines but sometimes, it’s not possible. For example, if you try to include “forex” or “diet” in a domain name, you will see that there is only one way to have it included, and this is choosing a very long and complex domain name, at least in english, the more common language on Internet.

Have you noticed that in the present time, many of the new web services have strange domain names? As example we have flickr, plurk, tumblr and others… The reason of that is due to the supersaturation of the internet, forcing the people to acquire strange, but short and easy to remember domain names.

Where to buy?

You can acquire and register low cost domain names at GoDaddy. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and is the flagship company of The Go Daddy Group, Inc. Go Daddy is widely recognized for its success, having been ranked #8 on the 2004 Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing privately held companies; #20 on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (growing 8,274 percent!); and having won the CNET Editor’s Choice award in 2001, the Name Intelligence Largest Net Gain Award in 2002, 2003 and 2005; the Name Intelligence Users’ Choice Award in 2005 as well as the #1 Best Overall Registrar in 2003. Go Daddy also won the Arizona Corporate Excellence Award for fastest growing privately-held company in 2003 and Most Innovative Large Company in 2004.

Things you should consider before buying a domain

Before buying a domain, I recommend you to make a big list of possible names. Remember that possibly, many of that names could be already taken by someone else, so try to have a wide list. Also, you should ask to yourself the following questions:

• Is it catchy, is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to spell/pronounce?
• How long/short is it?
• Is it complex or simple?
• And may be the most important, match this name with my website/service/product?

Then, it’s time to go to GoDaddy and look for what you have listed. If you are lucky, you could find a shot and catchy website domain name . Good luck with that!

Hi bloggers, as you know leaving comments in other blogs can be a great way to get traffic, expand your brand and impose your authority on Internet. I like to leave relevant comments in the most of the blogs I daily visit, receiving many exposure in front of many people.

Today, I want to introduce a tool which can help you in this task. May be you have heard about Traffic Kahuna, a paid tool which you can boost your website, getting a lot of traffic and ranking better on search engines. The same team has a free tool called Comment Kahuna, which you can get targeted backlinks to your blog, without using risk techniques that can destroy your search engine rankings.

As you could see, this is a powerful tool which you can make quicker the process of commenting in other blogs. Also, by searching for blogs without no follow you can get some backlinks, useful to increase your PR.