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Submitting to directories is a great way to build links and increase your search engine rankings. In semi-competitive industries it can produce great results. If you add article creation and social media marketing into the link building equation then you can achieve great results for any industry.

The Ultimate Guide to Directory Submissions

Free or Paid Directories?

When choosing directories going for the paid ones can be better, mainly because the links seem to last a lot longer. Many of the free directories seem to disappear or delete links after a year or so. However, there are a few free directories out there that should always be used – directories that have stood the test of time.

Niche or General Directories?

Submitting to a combination of both niche and general directories is usually a good idea.

For most industries there are a variety of niche directories out there – the best way to find them is through a search engine. Do a search on Google, MSN or Yahoo for directories in your niche area – those that come up in the first few pages of results are usually the best ones to use.

With general directories it’s better to go for those that are more established. The older a directory is, the better.

PageRank – Does It Still Matter?

Because directories are generally quite large, they need a certain amount of PageRank to get all of their pages indexed properly. However a high PageRank isn’t the be-all and end-all. Google’s recent crackdown on directories has made visible PageRank even more irrelevant when it comes to choosing directories. There are directories out there that have no PageRank whatsoever that can offer value.

If a directory is ranking well in the search engines then you can rest assured that it has enough PageRank. If you’re unsure then check how many links it has via Yahoo! Site Explorer or another link popularity checker.

Anchor Text

It’s always best to get the main search phrases that you are targeting in the links to your site. However this isn’t always possible and unfortunately many of the best directories won’t let you do this. Sometimes you can get around this problem by slipping in a search phrase at the end of your company name.

Before submitting, have a good look around a directory and get a feel for what you can and can’t get away with. Some directory owners will let you use a search phrase on its own, whereas others are very strict and will only use your business/website name. In between you have those where you might just be able to slip a search phrase in.

Doing your homework comes in handy – if you try to use a search phrase on its own and they change it to your business/website name then it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to get them to change it to your website name with a search phrase at the end. If you’d submitted it like that in the first place you may have got away with it.

Always try to get one of your search phrases in and vary the anchor text as much as possible – this will appear more natural to the search engines.

Varying Your Description

Many directories will provide you with your own page about your business. If you have the same description on every page across different directory websites, then many of these will be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and your links will get devalued.

To avoid this, write a unique and substantial description for every single directory (200+ characters works best). Make sure the descriptions accurately mirror your products and services and that they read well.

Deep Linking

Many directories allow you to add extra links directly to internal pages of your website. You should take turns in linking to different pages of your website using different variations of the phrases you’re targeting on each page. Using the same anchor text to link to the same page over and over again will appear unnatural to the search engines and this could work against you.

How Many Directories Should You Submit To?

There’s no fixed number of directories that you should get listed in. Work out a 12 month directory submission budget for each site and then do so many each week or month for the full duration.

When you’re building links to your site via directories or any other method, you should do it over time. Submitting to 100 directories in a week and then forgetting about it won’t be as effective as spreading the 100 directory submissions over a 3 month period.

The Top 10 Directories

Finally, here’s a list of the top free and paid general directories to get you started.

5 of the best free directories include:

• Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/)
• World Site Index (http://www.worldsiteindex.com/)
• Domaining.in (http://www.domaining.in/)
• Web World (http://www.webworldindex.com/)
• Search Sight (http://www.searchsight.com/)

5 of the best paid directories include:

• Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/)
• Best of the Web (http://botw.org/)
• Business.com (http://www.business.com/)
• Aviva (http://www.avivadirectory.com/)
• Ezilon (http://www.ezilon.com/)

According to online statistics from eMarketer, less than 20% of internet users intentionally read content with the aid of an RSS reader.

Indeed, even frequent internet users have no idea what that little orange RSS square represents and certainly don’t realize that there is a big shift brewing in the bowels of online publishing and marketing.

But, that may change more quickly than we all used to think for 3 very potent reasons.

There are advantages to RSS that will compel most, if not all, internet users and content consumers to “learn” to use an RSS reader and start managing RSS subscriptions.

In the same way email eclipsed snail mail for content delivery, RSS will eclipse email as the consumer’s choice for opt-in messaging.

If you are an email marketer, the time for you to get engaged to RSS has come, because, whether you like it or not, the wedding bells will be ringing soon.

Here’s why…

RSS = Embedded Video (and audio)

I recently was asked to help a small business embed video into emails they wanted to send to established clients.

Their vision was clear:

1. Create a quick video email with a webcam, stick it right into their corporate Outlook email with a Youtube style preview.

2. The customer gets the email, clicks the Youtube-looking video preview and the video starts playing.

3. No landing page, they wanted everthing to happen right there inside the email client, whether it was Outlook, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo or otherwise.

Simple right? Nope…

This is simply not possible with email.

Many brilliant companies have tried various tactics to embed video into email in a way that doesn’t consistently get blocked or stripped by the various email providers.
With email, the best that can be done is mimic the embedded video look by putting a video preview image in the email which opens up the web browser and plays the video there when clicked.

Ironically, even this comes at a significant cost because of the technical knowledge needed to make it happen.

So why is this a less than perfect solution?

Primarily because none of us like to be bounced around, we want to view video instantly, seamlessly.

After all, we have been trained to expect this level of immediacy by seeing it everyday on Google’s “universal search” and countless blogs.

The good news is, embedded video and audio are part and parcel (fundamental elements) of RSS.

Adding video (and audio) that can be instantly viewed by someone receiving an RSS feed is as simple as adding text.

Readers get what they have come to expect and corporations, as well as small businesses, can provide dynamic, highly personal content without paying a coder or webmaster thousands of bucks.

RSS = 100% Deliverability

I was shocked to see the stats on email deliverability rates for the typical business. The fact is, even if you have come by a person’s email honestly (that is – you did not buy a bootleg list of emails from some guy in a dark virtual alley) the likelihood of them actually receiving that message from you is 60% or less.

So, let’s say you have a list of 1000 customer emails – which you have worked hard and paid real money to acquire. When you send a message, 400 of them (on average) don’t get it. It either automatically lands in their Sp@m Folder or gets deleted even before it reaches them.

Even companies like Aweber who make a living sending emails for other people and have intimate agreements with email providers like Gmail, AOL and Yahoo, only get a 90% deliverabilty rate – on a good day (they claim %99.4 but I use Aweber and when I factor in the whole opt-in and email management process, at least 10% of my emails are undelivered).

RSS is quite different. If someone has opted-in to your RSS “feed”, they will get 100% of your messages. No doubt about it.

This is obviously good for the company but how is this also an advantage for the customer?

Well, have you ever had the frustration of opting-in to something that you were interested in only to find (after searching for a few minutes) that it was buried in your sp@m box.

Have you ever had to “whitelist” an email address so that each email that was sent wasn’t immediately deleted?

Doing this takes TIME… the most expensive commodity any one of us owns.

Once consumers realize there is a simpler way to get 100% of what they want, 100% of the time, and 0% of what they don’t want, RSS will start to look like a (pardon the old expression) “no brainer”.

RSS = Sp@m-Free

This may be the “tipping point” that triggers the general masses toward RSS.

Yes, sp@m is annoying… it takes time to delete… it contains inappropriate messages which make parents steaming mad… and it is the constant burden of corporations and email providers.

Especially due to the last reason, email will not be free forever. You may not have to pay if you send just a few emails to your friends and family each month but if your sending out a significant number of messages… you will pay.

This will be the email manager’s final attempt at curbing the clever spammer.

In fact, email providers are already debating and tweaking a platform similar to cell phone companies where you will have a sending quota.

This will only push spamming into a “higher” art form and challenge the suprisingly intelligent geeks behind this modern phenomenon to new technical heights.

All of this will only serve to highlight the value of RSS even more and compel the average folks into opening up a Google Reader account or using the one they goofed around with more often.

However, before RSS eliminates email as we know it, a few things have to happen…

In the first part of this article we discussed the three compelling features of RSS that will lure the mases of content seekers.

Namely, embedded video, 100% deliverability and sp@m-free information management.

But, before any of us permanently trades in our email account for an RSS Reader, a few things need to happen.

Until then, we will be doing double-duty… checking both our Inbox and our latest feeds.

What RSS Needs Before It Kills Email

1. RSS Content Clients (like Outlook for RSS).
As it stands, messages which are sent via RSS are usually composed inside some sort of blog or other similar content management system and published to the world. All the folks who have requested the RSS “feed” then receive that message into the RSS reader they check whenever it is convenient for them. Generally speaking, the entire group of subscribers gets every message.

Now, imagine a software application that works like an email client such as Outlook that allows you to create a message, format it, add video and audio and then send it to just one (or a selected group) of subscribers via RSS…All without having to publish that content to the world.

This would be the silver bullet solution to all the woes of email.

2. RSS to One or Selected Groups
One of the current appeals of RSS is the fact that one can subscribe to an RSS feed anonymously. You are assured of receiving only messages from that person or website (which is hopefully run by a person) and nothing else. Neither the website owner or the RSS service knows anything about the subscriber. This is a good thing and something that will continue to make RSS valuable.

However, at some point, a more personal RSS option should appear which allows the subscriber a choice. In the future, when someone chooses to subscribe to an RSS feed, h/she will have the option of sharing personal information with the publisher, perhaps just their name and a few selected interests.

They will be glad to do this for two reasons.

1. It will allow the publisher to send only content that matches their desired interests (this is actually already possible but very few take advantage of it).

2. It will allow for private RSS communication between individuals and groups with all 3 benefits listed above – embedded media, 100% deliverability, sp@m-free.

What Killer-RSS Will Look Like

In this new more advanced world, you will have a personal RSS address. Not connected to a business or blog content, just to you personally. Yes, you may be thinking… “just like my email address”.

When someone wants to hear from you, they will go to some fancy Web 2.0 service and subscribe to your personal RSS feed. They will sign-up for their own personal RSS feed and then subscribe to yours, providing you with their name (if they are a friend) and perhaps their interests if they are a business contact.

When you want to send them, and only them a message, you’ll open up the fancy wysiwyg editor provided by the cool Web 2.0 service mentioned above, create a message and publish it.

Sounds like email right? Exactly…

The difference is, you publish the message not to your public blog but to a private space on the net and to your friend’s RSS reader.

So, your friend checks their RSS reader, sees your name on their list of subscriptions, notices that you have published a message to them (and maybe a few other friends) and either reads the message in their reader or in the private space online.

So, as this shift occurs, what we are calling Killer-RSS will be viewed as an upgrade to typical email services with the added benefits mentioned above.

What do you think – will RSS be the email killer? If not, how do you see the RSS – email relationship working out?

An online business might have three or more main types of customers, each with different needs and different triggers that motivate a purchase. How do you design a website that can maximize the conversion rate for each of these customer types? Here are the steps:

1. Research Your Customer Base

 

Look at people who have purchased your goods or services recently. How might you categorize them? Begin with demographics: attributes such as age, gender, relative income level. What typical needs is this person seeking to meet? What kinds of offers motivate this person? What is this person’s shopping method — impulse buy or careful research? You can find out a great deal by interviewing your customer service representatives and sales people. Ask randomly selected customers to fill out a brief survey using an inexpensive service such as SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com), preferably soon after purchase. Conduct phone interviews with customers to learn more about their needs.

2. Develop Several Personas or Customer Profiles

 

Based on your research, narrow down your main customer types into two to four categories. Start with a few; you can always expand later. Now begin to write a brief profile of what a typical representative of this category might look like. Give him or her a name, location, age, marital status, salary range, job position, etc. What kind of background does she have? What periodicals, e-zines, or blogs does he read? What organizations might she belong to? What is his purchasing approach? What are her primary motivators? Do this for each customer type.

 

For example, you might meet these fine folks visiting wilsonweb.com:

 

    * Ernest Hoboken, 62, Jacksonville, FL, is a newbie who needs to learn how to sell model railroad accessories online to create an income after retirement next year.

    * Jennifer Herblock, 25, Schaumburg, IL., has recently been placed in charge of marketing for an eight-employee business and desperately needs to generate more traffic to her company’s website.

    * Morris Havener, 43, Boise, ID, is an Internet marketing consultant working on a customer project that requires repeated visits to the Web Marketing Today Research Room to review literature in the field.

    * Cheryl Hopinskip, 31, Tucson, AZ, has been a website designer for two years, but sees the need to learn SEO so she can improve the performance of her clients’ websites.

 

But go beyond the mere sentence or sketch that you see above. Use your research with along with your imagination. Write a detailed persona profile that fills a page or two. The more you can get into this person’s skin, the better you and your copywriters can prepare sales copy that motivates this persona to purchase from you. Copy that is written for the “average” prospect, on the other hand, is written for no one in particular and often fails miserably.

 

3. Design a Sales System for Each Persona

 

Now carefully write landing pages designed for just this type of customer. You may start building a single landing page for each persona. But you may find yourself designing a series of pages — a whole sales path — that leads to the sale.

4. Segment Visitors into Sales Paths

 

The final step is to guide prospects into the correct sales paths on your site. With PPC advertising you have some control, since different customer types may have characteristic keywords they typically search on. But expect to segment your visitors from your site’s key landing pages and direct them into the appropriate sales path. To see how segmentation is accomplished, study the homepages of Dell (www.dell.com) and Hewlett Packard (www.hp.com).

 

Is this a lot of work? Oh, yes! But if you follow these steps carefully, conversion rates will rise substantially.