More on How to Rank on The Search Engines
Posted on February 12, 2008
Filed Under | 1 Comment
After my last post I received the following from Paul:
“I’ve used the service you mentioned, Directory Maximizer, and I’d give it a thumbs up from my end as well. They did a fairly good job and the results worked well since I’ve used the service regularly as they keep adding new directories.
Although having said that, directory links alone won’t suffice. You also need to work on getting links from relevant sites. Directory links will only support your other links, in my opinion”
I agree 100%, Paul.
Here are the problems of relying totally on directories:
- As a general rule, directories permit links only to the root url (your home page). Google looks for deep links and directory link building does nothing to help that. There are a few directories that permit links to interior pages and when you find them you should send a link to an interior page but realize this will be rare.
- Directories are losing a lot of their page rank. Particularly with their interior pages where your links are most likely to reside.
- Directories do not provide enough focused, on topic content to make your links count highly.
So with directories being less effective than they used to be, what do you do?
A lot of gurus are proclaiming that using social media sites are the way to go. If you’ve not heard this latest buzz term you soon will. Social media sites are simply sites that permit varying levels of social interaction. Some are content sites (like Squidoo and Hubpages) and others are bookmarking sites (like Digg or Del.icio.us) and of course let’s not forget the top three most popular sites, Utube, Facebook and MySpace.
Now there are a few sites that are worth an investment of time but most of it won’t help you in the long term. Why? Because social media sites, highly proclaimed by the gurus out there as being able to rank in minutes on Google’s first page are only ranking for very long tail terms that will rarely get any traffic. Beyond that, their ’stickiness’ factor (how long do they stay on Google) is limited. And finally, these links don’t send folks directly to your site, it sends them to the host site and you have to hope that you can direct traffic to your site.
I’ll be releasing a video shortly on the truth behind social media. But in the meantime, don’t dispair. You see there is plenty you can do right now to rank well in the SERPs. Last year Yanik Silver asked me to present at his exclusive Underground III seminar and after a lot of arm twising on our part, we’ve gotten Yanik to agree to let us release the video taped presentation I gave then. Here’s the fun part – it all still works.
You can view the UG3 video at www.liveblueprints.com. We’ve parsed the video into 5 roughly 10 minute segements so you can watch it at your leisure and go back to the parts you want to review easily. And we’ve even added a fun, very short video on why dropshipping makes more sense than inventorying if you are considering setting up an ecommerce site.
Enjoy!
Nancy
P.S., If you want to sign up in the opt-in box, we’ll be sure to let you know about our latest video releases. Of course I’ll post here as well.
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I am trying to come up with better ranking keywords for my website and want to know if there is a limit on how many keywords I place in my Meta keyword list? Can too many hurt me in google ranking?
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Nancy Replies:
Lawrence,
You can’t just keep adding keywords to your keyword meta tag. First there is an excellent chance this will look spammy to Google. And even if it didn’t it wouldn’t help you rank for those words.
First only try to rank a page for 1 or 2 keywords. However, you can add what I refer to as variations and modifiers to the page to increase the traffic you can get off of that. For example, if you are trying to rank on the phrase ‘water filters’ then the singular ‘water filter’ is a variation. A modifier would be adding words like ‘unique’, ‘cheap’, ‘best’, or ‘portable’. You use your on page visible text as well as the description meta tag to include these words.
Nancy