Let’s face it… most people hate link building.

I think the reason most people hate link building is because they don’t do it correctly and get very bad responses from the emails, phone calls or smoke signals they send out. Link building doesn’t have to be difficult; you just have to be smart about it.

One very easy way to get links back to your website is to use directories. Some SEO consultants say directories are great; others say they stink. If you’re smart about the way you list your website in a directory, then you can get a lot of benefit out of them.

First and foremost, let me just say that most directories are pretty hopeless for actually sending through traffic that will convert. However, for SEO purposes, directories can be effective. With that in mind you may want to change your thinking about how you add your website’s details into a directory.

So here’s a list of ideas you might not have thought about when listing your website in directories.

Free vs paid directories for SEO

I never pay for directory listings. The only one I can see being of any value would be the Yahoo! Directory. This isn’t a must, but if you’re going to throw money at directories, go with the Yahoo! Directory. Many people have seen sharp rises in traffic when they have listed with the Yahoo! Directory, however, list your business with caution.

Yahoo! have been known to show the title of the listing in their directory in SERPs (search engine results page) so if you have a title tag for your homepage that zings and gets loads of clicks, be aware that this might change if you list your site in the Yahoo! Directory.

Of all the free directories, the one I list ALL my websites with is DMOZ. I suggest you go and list your site now… go on… I’ll wait. Here’s the link - www.dmoz.org.

All the other directories are pretty much the same, some better than others. It really depends on a lot of factors like how many other competitors there are in the directory, how competitive your industry is (in terms of search) and how the directory is put together (the underlying code and software that runs the website).

Use keyword-rich domains in your directory listings

Most people when they purchase a domain name go with their business name. Typically this will be a name like “Windsplinter Design” or “CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet”. That’s great, but for a customer using a search engine looking for your product or service, they’re not going to look for that name. They’re going to look for the generic equivalent of your product or service. So if Windsplinter Design designed and sold ergonomic chairs, the domain name I would be suggesting to them to purchase would be www.ergonomicchairs.com.au.

This way they could use this domain in all their directory listings and because it’s keyword-rich, they automatically have great anchor text linking back to their site. If you’re not sure what anchor text is, you will want to check out this post.

This tactic is particularly handy if you don’t have any control over what gets linked back to your website from a directory. Sometimes it’s the business name, sometimes it’s the URL. If you can only link your URL back to your website, having a keyword-rich domain like the example above will help you rank for the terms you have within the URL.

Add more than one listing

This tactic is handy if the directory you’re submitting your site to links the business name to your website. So rather than add ‘Windsplinter Design’ as your business name, put in a keyword like ‘ergonomic chairs’ as the business name. If the directory automatically accepts new listings, you’re onto a good thing. Add some more listings and use different pages in your site. For example you might add ‘red ergonomic chairs’ and use the URL of your red chair page in that listing (don’t fall into the trap that you have to use your main domain name, you can use internal page addresses as well).

Use a <href> element in your copy

This is an excellent way to get really targeted anchor text back to your site. Essentially all you’re doing is adding raw html code to the body of the directory. Some directories allow this, others do not so you will have to experiment to see which ones work.

So if you’re targeting the term “flowers Brisbane” you might add this code to the body of the directory:-

ABC123 Pty Ltd can supply all kinds of <a href=”http://www.abc123.com.au”>flowers in Brisbane</a>

The ‘a href’ section of the tag indicated that a link is coming up. The hyperlink is obviously the page you wish the text “flowers in Brisbane” to link back to, and in between the <a href=”http://www.youdomainname.com.au”> and the </a> this is where you put your text.

So <a href=”http://www.abc123.com.au”>flowers in Brisbane</a>

would look like this in the directory: flowers in Brisbane

So there you have it, some really handy tips on using directories in your SEO strategy.
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Making sure your website is crawlable is possibly the most important part of your online marketing strategy, because without a crawlable website you won’t get into a search engine’s index. Without any pages in a search engine’s index, nobody’s going to find your site through search engines. It’s pretty simple. Making sure your website can be crawled by a search engine’s spider means your website has the potential to be found!

Lots of people ask me “Why isn’t Google crawling my website?” and the answer to this question is usually pretty straightforward. There are loads of reasons why a search engine won’t crawl your website.

Here are a few of the main reasons:-

Full Flash website

Full Flash websites are death for search engine marketing. Technology simply hasn’t gotten to the point where search engines are able to recognise words on images. If your site is built fully in Flash I can almost guarantee you your website will not be indexed by search engines and people definitely won’t be able to find it.

Example - www.takethisdance.com
I’ve picked this site quite arbitrarily as an example. As a website it looks spectacular and the visual appeal is definitely something that makes this website breathtaking. But look under the hood and you will find that this site will not do very well in driving traffic through search engines.

If you do a simple site operator in Google on this website you will see there’s only one page in the index. Not a great result if you’re looking at driving traffic through search engines.

If you have a full Flash website there’s only two ways to get around not being crawled:-
1. Scrap the website and start all over.
2. Create a mirrored website of the Flash version (basically build a html version of the Flash website).

Site Architecture

Having the wrong site architecture can mean your website won’t be crawled (the term ‘site architecture’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘how your website has been built’). Typically if you have javascript menu structures or an ajax driven website, you will find search engines have trouble with crawling and indexing these types of sites.

Example - www.trucksuniqueaz.com
From an SEO standpoint this site is a mess. The first thing wrong with this site is the menu structure. It’s written entirely in Javascript. Looks great but doesn’t work from an SEO standpoint as they only have one page in the index.

Not only that, but all their page titles are called “Milonic DHTML/JavaScript Menu Sample Page”. What that has to do with trucks I don’t know! I’m really, really hoping that this is a demo site for this javascript menu system… but it doesn’t really look that way.

Framed websites

Framed websites are also really difficult to get indexed. If you’re not sure what a framed website looks like check out this example

If you click on the menu items of this page you will see the URL doesn’t change. Typically when you navigate through the pages of most websites, the URL will change (for example if you go to the about us page it’s usually called www.yourdomain.com.au/aboutus.html or something similar). The website URL in this example stays the same no matter what menu item you click.

The way framed websites work is that pages are pulled into a frame. You usually have a banner and the side menus and the content area. The content pages are sometimes left blank (i.e no branding on them) because they’re pulled into the frame (header and side area) – the branding component of the site is in the header and side menu. This can be bad news from a branding example.

Let’s look at this site again because some of their internal pages have been indexed but not in the right way. If you were to navigate to this site through a search engine you wouldn’t know what to do. For example, this site ranks number one in Google for the term “Austsafe Investment Choice”; now the top result is this URL:-

www.austsafe.com.au/investmentchoice.html if we go to that page there’s no menu structure, no banner, nothing… just content. This is because the content page is left blank and then pulled into the frame (header and side menu area that actually contains the branding). This page doesn’t give a visitor any options other than clicking the back button and doing another search or closing down the window and going somewhere else.

Too many variables in URLs

When talking about variables in URLs, these are symbols like &, ? and > or <. These symbols can make it difficult for search engine spiders to crawl your website and the more you have in your URLs the harder it will be to crawl. Google are getting pretty good with indexing these types of URLs but Yahoo and MSN are still playing catch up.

This URL from the Joomla extensions area is a good example of a URL with multiple variables (a few dashes and a #).
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,394/Itemid,35/#rev-12898

Google can crawl this, however Yahoo has trouble:-

Robots.txt file is wrong

What is a robots.txt file? A robots.txt file is a file that you can put onto your web server to tell search engines what pages not to crawl. It’s basically a set of instructions to tell the search engines where they shouldn’t go. The easiest way to see if you have a robots.txt file on your site is to go to www.yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt

Here’s what mine looks like. http://www.peterdowse.com.au/robots.txt

You have to be very careful what you disallow search engines to see as if you disallow the whole website, they won’t crawl it!

I won’t go into the ins and outs of robots.txt files as that’s a whole other post. If you’re interested in learning more, take a look at some of these examples:-

OK, so that’s what not to do… what’s the right thing to do?

Well the easiest way to see if your website is crawlable is to either do a site operator in one of the major search engines and see how many pages you have in the index (just type in site:www.yourdomain.com.au into a search engine), or you can conduct a spider simulation.

Conducting a spider simulation

Conducting a spider simulation on your website can be really handy. What you’re doing is looking at your website the way a search engines crawler does. There are loads of tools for conducting spider simulations but the one I use is Webconf’s spider simulator

All you need to do is add your domain name into the search box and it will show you all the text it can crawl and all of the links the simulator can follow. If this simulator comes up blank then you’re in trouble.

Create deep links throughout your website

A deep link is a link to an internal page of your website. For example if I were to link the term how to set up an xml sitemap this would be classed as a deep link to another page on my site. Deep linking is great for SEO value and it also gives the search engine crawlers many paths through your website. When deep linking your website, remember to keep the links relevant and try to add keywords within the words you link.

Create a html sitemap

Creating a .html sitemap is another great way to let the engines know what pages are on your site. When I talk about a html sitemap, this is a page on your site that has links to all the other pages on your site. Like the sitemap page on this website:-

Create an xml sitemap

One of the best ways to ensure your site is fully crawlable is to create an xml sitemap. I won’t go into that in this post as I’ve already written a two-part post about this.

Hopefully this gives you a pretty good outline of how to make sure your site crawlable. If you have any questions about the crawlability of your site, please leave a comment or send me an email.

We all know that being found in a search engine’s results page is important, right? Everyone by now (if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time) will know that keywords are a really important factor of your search engine optimisation strategy.

Choosing the right keywords and keyword phrases for use on your website is the key to driving the right type of traffic. At the end of the day most people want visitors to their website to perform some type of action - sign up to a newsletter, make a purchase, etc. One of the most important factors in doing this is to drive the right type of traffic to your website. Without the right type of visitors, your website will get loads of traffic (which looks great in an analytics report) but you won’t be converting any customers (which looks bad on the balance sheet).

Choosing the right keywords for your website

Choosing the right keywords for your website is a subtle art. Many people assume they need to rank for high level terms like cars, ebooks, software or flowers. There are a few major problems with this approach (particularly for small to medium businesses).

The problem with this approach is due to the long tail of search. So what’s the long tail of search? Well, imagine a comet. A furious, busy head with a long tail sweeping out behind it. In the busy, furious head there’s a lot of action and heaps going on. It’s exciting.

This head represents high level keywords like cars, ebooks, software or flowers. Typically the search volumes for these terms are huge i.e. there’s hundreds of thousands of people typing these terms into a search engine every day. With the high search volume comes a lot (I mean A LOT) of competition. Do a test… it’s pretty easy. Type ‘cars’ into Google and you get about 1.3 billion results. Yep, that’s billion. Type ‘commodores for sale Brisbane’ and you get about 17,500 results.

This last keyword phrase represents the long tail of the comet. The longer the tail gets, the longer the keywords are that people type into a search engine. But along with this comes less competition and more accurate intent behind a search.

The intent behind a search phrase

The most important thing you can do when choosing keywords to use in your website is to get the intent behind a search right. Lets take the last two keywords we used as an example
• cars
• commodores for sale Brisbane

Let’s look at cars. If you sell cars, it makes sense that you would want to rank number one for the term cars, right? Wrong. Let’s think about the intent behind this search term. Are people looking for cars to buy, cars to rent, the history of cars, perhaps how they work… who knows? This term is very broad so the intent behind this search is very broad. We don’t really know what a person wants when they type cars into a search engine. We know it’s something to do with cars, but beyond that is anyone’s guess.

Now let’s look at ‘commodores for sale in Brisbane’. This is a more accurate search phrase and gives us a better indication of what the searcher is looking for. It’s pretty blatant. Sure there’s less people looking for this term but if you sold cars in Brisbane you would have a better chance of converting the second searcher into a customer.

Chasing the long tail

With SEO becoming more and more popular it’s getting more difficult (and expensive) to rank for higher level keyword terms. It makes sense for smaller businesses that simply can’t create a website like eBay, www.realestate.com.au or Wotif to chase longer tail keyword terms. Here are a few reasons why:-

• They are usually easier to rank for as there’s less competition
• They convert much better than higher level keyword terms
• Whilst you get less traffic you have a better chance of converting the traffic you do get (I would rather get 50 sales out of a hundred inquiries than 50 sales from a thousand… wouldn’t you?)

So in closing, remember high level keyword terms are tempting to reach for but chances are, you won’t get there and if you do, you would have spent a lot of money on getting loads of untargeted traffic. Rather then spending $1000 on one page getting to the first page of a search engine for a high level keyword term, spend $1000 on ten pages for longer tail terms. This way you won’t be fighting tooth and nail to keep that one result in the first page (and your traffic along with it) and you’re spreading the risk if one of your pages drops in the rankings.

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