Enhancing Link Popularity With Productive Time Management

In regards to marketing a website, one of the primary stops for many site owners are web directories. While there’s a mixed opinion on the value of web directories, as compared with more reputed article directories, there has been an explosion of web directory networks recently. It is most of these directory networks which I will address in this article.

If we take note of Google, which to tell the truth we should, then everyone knows excellent quality is paramount to achieving success. How should we know this? Well, Matt Cutts said it naturally! Seriously, Matt is right on the money. What exactly is more effective, publishing to 1,000 free directories that reside on the same network and tend to be interlinked or submitting to a single quality directory? I would personally use my time submitting to a single quality directory any day of the week.

Owning a web directory is serious business. The volume of effort that is placed into a directory can determine its level of quality. If it offers poor editorial standards, quality is tossed out the window and that directory becomes nothing more then a link farm.

The majority of website directory networks reside on the same hosting server, which is already shared with hundreds or thousands of additional internet sites. Once these directory networks get massive, and acquire some traffic from the various free directory lists, the server can slow with a turtles pace. This isn’t suitable for anybody, especially the blameless people that have been hosting on that server already.

Many of the web directory networks operating at this time are set to auto approve all of the submissions. By producing a cron job at a selected point in time, all listings are instantly approved. Editors have been been replaced by computer code that opens up the floodgates to anyone. Categories quickly become cluttered with unrelated listings and unwanted listings find their way inside the directory too.

So the question begs, why would people create such networks? The majority of the directory networks out there have tactically positioned ads. You know, the advertisements right near the submit link. Someone inadvertently clicks the ad then bam, that directory owner earns money. Multiply this by hundreds or even thousands of web directories, and you have plenty of clicks. The main problem is that the bounce rate for these clicks are almost certainly high, and most of these people are the same individuals screaming they are smart priced by an advertising network.

Typically speaking, the benefit of directory networks is brief for its owner. Traffic is produced from being included in a directory list, but once that directory is no longer brand new, the website traffic it gets slows to just a trickle. This is precisely why directory network owners are compelled to develop additional directories. They want that continual supply of visitors to deliver the ad revenues they are after.

The harsh truth is that I have seen very few web directory networks that exist more then their first year. These web directory networks usually shut down when their owner figures out that there is very small revenue growth, but a continuous cycle of difficult work. As entrepreneurs, we only have a limited amount of time. Will submitting to directory networks assist us in our online marketing endeavors or are we best searching for the true gems that might still be in their early stages of success? After seeing so many web directory networks crumble, it is my firm belief that webmasters may be best served by submitting to high quality article and web directories instead.

Valerie is a web directory editor whom has edited large numbers of directory submissions. Her goal is to produce superior listings for website owners and for those that see their listings.

How Caffeine Is Already Changing the Search Landscape

When people talk about the future of search, they often include factors such as mobile, social, real-time, and other buzz-type words. But it is not very often that they offer an explanation as to how these elements will impact search moving forward. However, in this interview with WebProNews, search veteran Bruce Clay tells that side of the story.

In the early days, Clay says SEO was easy. He goes on to say that it was somewhat defined even 5 years ago, but social, mobile, and local are not defined at all. Now, SEO is more difficult and targeted and will get even harder over time. He calls the top 3 search results the new first page.

“You can’t be good at SEO, you have to be great,” says Clay.

In the next 18 months, he believes the hottest topics in SEO circles will be local, social media, conversions, and somewhat surprisingly, only some discussion about mobile. The reason for this lack of mobile discussion is because people do not like the mobile browser.

Clay thinks the mobile device will become an operating system with the ability to connect apps directly to the Web, which would eliminate the need for a browser. Although he believes a “find” app will be dominant over a search app, he doesn’t believe that mobile will replace search.

In regards to Google’s recent MayDay update, Clay says he saw nothing but good results for sites that optimized for the long tail. While sites that had casual long tail results lost some traffic, he pointed out that it didn’t impact their conversions.

Google Caffeine is another update that has been receiving a lot of attention of late and Clay had a lot to share about it as well. Last year, Google said that it was rolling Caffeine out to one data center and would slowly roll it out to the others. After having a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts, Clay believes Caffeine is completely rolled out now but just not in 100 percent of the queries.

He goes on to say that advantages of Caffeine are the near real-time page index updates and increased spam filters. In addition, he says there are several behind-the-scenes factors that make it even more interesting. Although Google has not officially announced it, users can now buy Unicode characters in urls and the search engine supports it.

He also brings up a point about how Google recently said that it has 200 variables in the algorithm. As a result, search results were slower and behavioral search was penalized. Moving forward, Clay believes that multiple disjointed queries will determine search results but says it can’t be done without a faster index.

One of the big details that Google has emphasized about Caffeine is its faster index. According to Clay, if behavioral search works, PPC ads will be better and more targeted, which means that ROI will increase. As the ROI increases, the bid will also increase, which would ultimately generate more revenue for Google. All that said, the searchers would win as well since they would be getting better results.

Clay has given us a lot to think about. How do you feel about his projections?

Is Google MayDay Affecting You?

Any time Google makes an update to its algorithm, it’s a big deal for webmasters. Following this trend, the Web community has reacted strongly to MayDay, a recent algorithm update from the search engine.

As Google’s Matt Cutts explains to WebProNews, one of the primary goals of MayDay was to address the people who do the “bare minimum” to avoid being classified as spammers. This type of content is often referred to as content farms. Due to the many complaints Google received about these content farms, the search company made changes to its algorithm to ensure that it returns the best sites for users.

“We’re trying to spot what are the signals for quality for pages or sites that really are going to be good for users,” says Cutts.

If webmasters find themselves affected by these changes, Cutts suggests that they re-evaluate their content to make sure they are providing the highest quality content. According to Cutts, the sites most readily affected are those with auto-generated pages.

On the topic of Caffeine, Cutts compares the index changes as moving from a bus to a limo. Back in 2003, the updates were slow, but with Caffeine, the index is faster, fresher, and richer. He says as soon as a document is documented, it is indexed.

In this interview, Cutts also encourages webmasters to submit video sitemaps. Just as regular sitemaps are important to help Google discover pages, the search company wants to be able to have a comprehensive view of all the videos on the Web as well.

New Google Features Create SEO Opportunities

Google’s Matt Cutts always offers helpful advice, and our conversation with him at Google I/O was no exception. Cutts catches us up on a variety of search items including Google Squared, PageRank, and the recent redesign to Google’s search results page.

Google Squared is a new tool that puts search results into a spreadsheet-like list. It essentially organizes the results into facts, so users don’t have to click on multiples sites to find what they need. Cutts refers to it as a “sideways query” and points out that it could provide new information for users that they would not have previously found using traditional search.

When we spoke with Cutts earlier this year, he mentioned the growing obsession that SEOs and webmasters have with PageRank. We asked him about it in the above video, and while he did say it was important, he was quick to point out that it was only one of the more than 200 signals Google takes into consideration. He says content, title, url, and proximity are a few of the factors that have additional influence.

Users have also probably noticed the new redesign to the search results page. Cutts says the left-handed navigation was present for a while before the company decided to surface it for all search results.

Interestingly enough, the options are different based on each query. A search for Tom Cruise, for example, would probably return image results in the navigation. On the other hand, a search for President Obama would return real-time results and updates. Cutts says it creates more opportunities for webmasters and SEOs.

Lastly, Cutts did say that Caffeine was coming along nicely and indicated that there would be some announcements regarding it coming soon. Keep watching WebProNews for all the latest details on it.

How to Increase Your Site’s Performance

Late last year, Google’s Matt Cutts told WebProNews that site performance would be a critical factor this year. Since that time, site performance has been a hot topic in the SEO community. Incidentally, Maile Ohye, also from Google, calls this area an “uncharted SEO territory” in a recent interview with WPN.

According to her, simple changes to the front end, such as how you order the style sheets and JavaScript files, can have a big impact on speed and, ultimately, conversions. She references a test that Strangeloop conducted in which it compared the site performance of an optimized site to the site performance on a non-optimized site. The test found that the optimized site had a 16 percent increase in conversions over the non-optimized site.

Ohye explains the importance of ordering style sheets and JavaScript files since it could save visitors seconds when visiting your site. She suggests having statements at the top that bring in the style sheets first followed by the JavaScript files.

For images, she advises webmasters to use image sprites, which are essentially single files that can have multiple images listed throughout the file. This eliminates the task of making file requests for each image. With sprites, webmasters can use CSS to choose which images should display where.

Although the topic of “speed as a ranking factor” has also been getting a lot of press lately, Ohye says users will not wake up one day and find the fastest sites with the highest rankings. She goes on to say that this element of ranking is more suited for sites that are so slow the users are dissatisfied.

Ohye also tells webmasters they can check their own site’s performance by applying the site performance feature in the labs section of Google’s webmaster tools. This tool will tell users how their site compares with all the other sites on the Web.

How is your site’s performance?

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