Giving ReviewMe a Try

After seeing and hearing some positive feedback about ReviewMe I recently decided that it would be worth it for me to dabble in getting a few reviews for my ebook, seo tools, and seo glossary. Rae recently reviewed ReviewMe, stating:

The site brought me a couple hundred visitors initially, which was a little below my expectations. But, it has continued sending visitors daily since the review launched (and yes, it has long been off the main page now, this site blogs several entries per day). Those visitors have also made the site money.

The site I had reviewed was given two links to the homepage with the site name as the anchor. The review was close to 300 words and they also added our logo to the review (which was also linked for a third link to the homepage from the review page). The blogger clearly stated that he was paid to review the site, but that all of the opinions about the site were his own and that only his time to review the site, not his thoughts *about* the site had been paid for.

I have not tracked sales from most of my ReviewMe reviews (because I do not generally track that granular), but John Chow put up affiliate links in his review of my ebook, and I can tell you that his review paid for itself the first day.

Know More Media offered book formatting tips:

Maybe along the left side of the page in the blank space, add something telling the reader what chapter they are in. Maybe add section numbering - 1.1a, 1.1b, etc.

Andy Beard highlighted a bunch of terms I need to add to my glossary.

Graywolf gave me some formatting tips for my glossary:

Ideally there would be a small bit of text, icon or graphic that would bring me back to the top of the document, at the end of every word might get a little distracting so adding one in between every letter would be OK. I also might think about adding a page only search box, pre-populated with terms from the page just to make navigating it a bit easier. Use a bit of fancy Javascript to use predictive filling.

Paul Stamatiou reviewed my glossary. In the review he both talked up SEO, and gave my glossary the thumbs up:

I had some SEO work done on this site in the summer and within a few weeks my traffic went from a daily average of 2,500 unique visitors to roughly 4,000 unique visitors per day. Those extra visitors are all from search engines. An optimized site can help your blog, portfolio or whatever your site hosts, rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and beyond. ... The glossary is extremely useful and has already earned a bookmark in my browser, and I only bookmark things I use - the rest get sent to my del.icio.us. I would like to see an offline version of the glossary as well. Perhaps a nicely styled PDF that gets updated every month or so.

Imagine a trusted voice with thousands of subscribers highlighting your industry, highlighting your website, and offering useful constructive criticism that will help you further improve your offering. Is it possible for ads to have any greater value?

Because I have been involved with ReviewMe, many people have told me that they thought ReviewMe was just an SEO tool, but I realize that links / rankings / SEO in general / brand building / trust building / sales are all just a side effect of getting exposure and satisfying market needs. The benefit of reviews from a network like ReviewMe is that you get exposure in active channels that people trust and are paying attention to.

Feedback, direct sales, direct relevant link equity, secondary citations, new readers, branding and awareness... buying reviews from ReviewMe could pay for themselves many ways over, if you create things worthy of exposure.

Interview of Digital Ghost

DigitalGhost is an odd fellow, in a good way. Always a blast to chat with, and a smart guy who gives me lots of good advice. He recently started blogging again, and that prompted me to ask him from an SEO.

Why the name DigitalGhost?

Two reasons. I was making money ghostwriting when the "Digital Age" came into being. CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. Everyone chatting online seemed to be just phantoms on a screen. Digital ghosts if you will.

How did you get into SEO?

I was selling computers and a friend of mine created a website, which was back in the days when maybe one person in fifty had an email account, and he asked me to look at it. The site had been live for six months but it wasn't getting any traffic.

I noticed that the title for every page was new_page_1. I changed the titles to reflect what the page content was about, created a footer crammed with keywords for every page and boom. He started getting crazy amounts of traffic. Within a month I had 4 sites built and I was hooked. I quit selling computers three months later.

A woman that lived next door to me had a wine site and asked for help getting it to rank. She had a friend that had a site about 900 numbers, and he had a friend with a site about;

I was an SEO for almost two years before I knew what it was called.

Does SEO, as a field, have much life left in it?

Of course it does. Search technology is still in its infancy. As the technology improves SEOs will be needed to help business owners deal with the changes. I believe that the technology will reach the point where the demand for SEOs is greater than it is now; especially as fewer and fewer of the self-taught SEOs are able to keep up with the technology.

Jakob Nielsen recommended using old words for findability. As a marketer, what is more important: using old words, or being able to create neologisms?

Keep it simple. Know your market and know the language your market uses. Banking on your ability to successfully market a new word isn't a strategy; it's a shot in the dark.

Why is linguistics important to SEOs and other internet marketers?

Linguistics offers insight into how people think, how they choose words and phrases, word dependencies, syntax, semantics, structure etc. The science is integral in search engine algorithms.

Are search engines matching keywords or concepts? What is the difference between the two? How might a shift in this change the SEO process?

They're matching keywords. The keyword "war" is quite simple, the concept of "war" isn't currently understood by the major engines. I could write an entire site about WWII without mentioning "WWII" and the engines would never rank it for "war" unless it acquired links with "war" in anchor text.

How might it change the SEO process? SEOs rely on keywords because the algos rely on keywords.

What are the most important books you have read about language, thinking, or communication?

There aren't any single books that I feel are that important. A single idea, or several, contained within a book may be important but I think it is dangerous to assign too much importance to any one book. I place quite a bit of importance on reading many books and weighing the ideas found within them. I tend to think it is bullshit when someone says, "that book changed my life".

What other books significantly helped shape you?

Now we're getting somewhere. I remember reading Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and hating the kid that pulled wings off flies and threw stones at horses. Old Yeller taught me quite a bit about strength of character. Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn taught me about friendship. Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, all of them had lessons. Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, Burning Daylight, more lessons.

I think we learn the lessons that shape us the most when we're young. But most importantly, the latent lesson that I learned was, "love words". All of those authors taught that lesson, though I never saw it written.

What drinks have helped shape you? What is your favorite Tequila?

Well, beer has added about twenty pounds of shape. As for tequila, just about any Añejo works.

You recently posted about sensationalistic headlines which have nothing to do with the content of the post. As more publishers come online, search engines and efficient ad networks commodify many of them, and more people are fighting for a finite amount of attention, will the web devolve into a series of half thoughts marketed by sensationalistic headlines? Or what publishing business models do you see as sustainable?

The web is too large for any single bad practice to ruin it. Most of the web is nothing but half-assed thoughts now and people still find it useful. As the need for better technology grows it will be met. The "cry wolf" headlines will meet the same fate as the little kid in the story.

As long as publishers focus on meeting their users' needs current models are sustainable. As soon as publishers shift the focus to their own needs they may as well quit. I can't count the times a site owner has said, "I need more traffic". How come they don't ask, "What do my users need"?

What are your thoughts on tagging and the like? Will it make search any more relevant, or is it an over hyped fad?

Tagging hasn't helped relevance a bit that I can see. Self-governing systems typically end up as nothing more than a fuster-cluck. People that insist that the more people that use a self-governing system, the better the system will work, need to have the Pareto Principle etched into those rose colored glasses they're wearing.

How can social media and other popularity based metrics promote the creation of quality content while maintaining a reasonable signal to noise ratio?

Editing. It would help if people didn't equate "more" to "better". Does Amazon need 600 book reviews for a single book? Does the world need 300 videos of people dropping Mentos into Diet Coke? You can increase the signal to noise ratio by limiting the number of people that can broadcast eh?

What is the difference between a horse and a donkey? Which animal is generally more entertaining?

A donkey is smaller than a horse and it has longer ears. Cross a mare, (female horse) with a Jack, (male donkey), and you get a Mule. Donkeys are more entertaining. They're like big dogs and they make excellent pets. Nothing in the world sounds like a donkey braying, except for the Jackass Penguin.

It seems Google in particular is placing a lot of weight on domain age and link authority related trust at the moment. Many people are leveraging this to spam Google via video hosting sites, social media sites, and attempts at mainstream media to get into consumer generated media. Where do you see Google going next with their algorithms?

Semantic search. Nofollow is a bust. They created this huge link mess with their damn green bar and an easily exploited algo, and then they tried to clean it up with something as pathetic as nofollow.

You post a lot about word and link relationships. How do people typically mess up internal linking?

By creating navigation that looks like a keyword list. By ignoring concepts and focusing on keywords. By thinking in terms of pages instead of thinking about an entire site. By neglecting in-context links.

As example, a client told me he had a site about "new and used trucks". According to his navigation text, his site was about truck accessories. Every truck model had 10-30 accessory links. Great text for accessories, poor text for trucks and he was wondering why he wasn't ranking for new/used/ trucks/ city/state.

Do you see search engines as moving beyond advertisement based business models? How might they change going forward?

No, it's easy, it's passive, and they have the whole world creating content they can slap ads on, why should they change?

Do you eventually see search engines as becoming more powerful than governments?

No, but I foresee governments using search engines to become more powerful.

How long might your current blog last?

No clue. Longevity isn't a good metric for quality though. Not that I'm saying I have a quality blog, but it's my blog. I can name some pretty pathetic directories that have been around for a long time. But I won't.

Danny just launched a new blog and it looks pretty damn good. So maybe the search engineers will learn that it's about relevancy, not domain age, link age, link authority or any of that other bullshit they throw out there to keep people distracted from the fact that it's all about what? Relevancy. Or is it the SEOs that keep throwing out dumb shit like "link age" for discussion? ; )

What are your favorite SEO Tools?

Whiteboards and a proprietary pattern analysis gizmo. SEO for Firefox is pretty damn good too.

What are your favorite non-SEO blogs?

Drivl is the only one I can think of at the moment. But I read a lot of online newspapers. Oh, and you can download the N.Y. Times reader now which makes reading the news a lot nicer.

Do you see a day when search moves past being primarily weighted on link authority?

Yes I do. Search engines like Hakia are already moving away from link-citation as the most important metric.

What might the next major metric be?

Wait for it, this is good, relevance. Yes. Relevance. Three thousand people linking to "white" using "black" as anchor text shouldn't make black rank for white. Relevancy isn't a popularity contest and I don't care what type of spin the Googlemeisters want to put on it.

What is the biggest piece of the concept relevancy that you think most SEOs overlook?

Not knowing when to quit. Carrying the concept relationship too far. For example, having a site about greeting cards, and creating a subdomain for birthday cake decorating and linking it from the 'birthday cards' section of the site. And then creating another sub for 'catering'. And since catering is 'related', may as well have a sub for 'entertainment'. Why not games? And toys? Toys can be... gifts... and damn near everything can be a gift so now the site has books, candles, ties, hats, pens, tools, Viagra, baldness cures and vacation packages.

SEOs have heard 'content is king' for so long that it's second nature to cover every possible phrase with a targeted page. Stop it already! Small, targeted sites do well too.

Blog Tag - 5 Things You Didn't Know About Aaron Wall

So there is a blog meme about learning things about bloggers. I was tagged by Dean, Jeremy, and Stuntdubl.

Here are 5 things you may not have known about me:

  1. I once emailed Tim Berners-Lee and he emailed me back.

  2. I met my first and only girlfriend through this blog. She bought my ebook. I love the interwebs :)
  3. I play sports too hard, and while being uncoordinated, I recently served in a game a tennis to my girlfriend at about 85 miles an hour. I won, and was feeling cool, until I realized I threw my back out. :)
  4. I am an air hockey lover, and last year I lost my ego and sense of self-worth when I lost at air hokey to my step father.
  5. I was a nuclear reactor operator before doing SEO. Just like Homer Simpson, but on a submarine.

I tag Werty, MrTurner, Simit, Neil Patel, and Andy Hagans.

Using Profitable Spam & Thin Content Sites for Keyword Research

Spammers Are Great Keyword Sources - Here's How to Mine Them:

(Disclaimer: This post might seem a bit confusing if you just read it. You may have to click the links to see the process and fully get what I am talking about.)

The good thing about high ranking spam is that you know that the people who are doing it are probably both creative and focused on ROI, so you might be able to come up with a few good keyword ideas based on their research.

When you see a site in the search results that does not seem like it makes sense, it is probably there because either a spammer bought it, or the site has content management system errors which allow spammers to add content to the site. For example, SafeSurf.com is an authoritative site which was recently ranking for a competitive financial query, which seemed out of character with the nature of that site. So lets say you see one of those spam pages ranking in the search results. If you are doing keyword research and have ran out of topics you can look for footprints on these spam sites to find new ideas. As long as Google's algorithms place as much weight on authority domains as they do right now you are bound to find some people abusing that hole by placing hundreds or thousands of pages targeting expensive keywords on them.

For example, after I got the full URL of that SafeSurf page, I pulled off the file name, and looked for other things in that same folder inurl:spammydomain.com/spammyfolder/. In addition to domain related searches like inurl: many of the spam pages may have other footprints or signature text that you may want to look for.

If there are many results there you can further filter through the spammer's keywords by adding a keyword to your query. For example, search for keyword inurl:footprint.

As you can see, SafeSurf.com is a valuable highly rated website...or at least one which is offering many high value loan related keyword phrases!

Want to Mine PPC Accounts for Keywords Too? Here's How:

Another good idea for coming up with conversion / profit oriented keyword ideas is to go to the Clickbank marketplace, search for a topic related to your keywords (like weight loss, for example), see what top selling merchants match your topic, and then plug those URLs into KeyCompete.com or SpyFu to find related keywords.

You can then run that list of keywords through an Overture search suggestion scraper to get an estimate of search volume. Or put them in the Google Traffic Estimator with no bid prices to see the estimated bid prices AND projected AdWords ad click volume. Then sort those traffic estimator results by search volume or overall value to find the most important keywords and keyword phrases.

Extend Your Content:

If you write real content about the major keyword phrases covered by highly ranked mass spammers or profitable ads associated with top selling products, and then track your referral logs, you can come up with even more specific keyword topics to write about.

Do You Have Anything Worth Reviewing?

So I decided to test out ReviewMe for one of my sites, and I think it has been a pretty cool experience. I think most advertisers are going to eat it up after they give it a go.

I actually had to look around a bit though to find things worth reviewing on the site I wanted reviewed because most of it was not too remarkable. Which, sorta leads to the point...is anything on your site worth reviewing? Is any of it remarkable? Most websites and most pages are not, but a few good well cited ideas bolted on a conversion oriented site can carry it in the SERPs.
Most real estate sites, for example, are information free pages segmented by town and tied to an MLS search. But if you could add just a couple good ideas to the site (like a history of the town complete with pictures of how it has changed over time, especially if you integrate things like census data and charts, or can score interviews of past mayors or other famous people from your area), get a few organic links to those ideas, and use that link authority to prop up the rest of the site you can move a site from a me too site to a top ranked site.

If you wanted someone to look at your site, what are the pages you would want them to look at? Does your site have any pages that makes your site stick out from competing sites?

Google AdSense as a Terrible Business Model

I am still a fan of AdSense as a way of determining a baseline income potential for a site, but I don't see it as a long-term viable business model for most small publishers. Why?

Smart Pricing (or Maybe Dumb Publishing?)

I friend told me how much he made from AdSense a year ago, and in spite of increasing his network pageviews 200% since then his earnings this month are 10% lower than they were a year ago.

And Google still does a sloppy job policing their partner network. What happens if their editorial review costs increase. What does that do to the percent of ad income Google needs to keep to keep growing?

A Glut of Publishing:

It is getting easier and easier to publish online. The number of people writing is probably growing at a faster rate than the number (and income of) of people reading, which means you will have to be more compelling and put more effort into your content and marketing if you want to keep your pageviews up.

And Google has been placing more weight on authoritative domains, which is squeezing many small players out of ranking in the search results.

Newspaper & Magazine Archives: More Glut:

As business deals are worked out, and trusted archived content comes online, many business models based on AdSense spam will lose a large portion of their traffic to mainstream media companies that are not currently fully leveraging their archives.

If Google bought YouTube how long before they buy Olive Software or create a similar technology?

Frothy Ad Market:

I just saw a big, ugly, and obtrusive AOL ad on Amazon.com's home page. If people are buying general untargeted graphic ads on the largest retail site they must be overpaying for it.

A Lack of Competition:

Some of the executives of Yahoo!'s Publisher program recently announced they were quiting, and with Google's lead in the contextual ad space with virtually no competition, I have to take that as a bad sign for Yahoo!, and for independent publishers in general.

Google's General Arrogance:

Today many publishers noticed bright Google logos in their ad boxes inviting readers to sign up for AdSense.

Potential Text Ad Blindness:

People have learned to ignore banners and common ad locations. How long until people learn to ignore common AdSense formats, especially as the ads appear so prevalently on so many sites? What if people become more receptive to identifying ads (even in the content area)?

Not Worth It:

Add all those up and it gets a bit bleak looking to AdSense as anything more than a baseline estimate for effortless income or a backfill for unsold inventory.

What if instead of monetizing every page, niche publishers used most of their pages to keep attention and link equity flowing their way, and then just monetized targeted high value sections of their sites using well integrated affiliate offers and/or selling direct products?

Reciprocation vs Friendships & Passion

Brett Tabke closed down his Buddy Links program many years ago, stating the following:

You must ask yourself why sites would join BL in the first place? Because they couldn't get listed in the search engines. That left us at times "bottom" feeding.

Broad Based Reciprocal Links Don't Work:

In spite of Matt Cutts mentioning how reciprocal links were hurting people some of my friends were still making the mistake of being too reliant on link trades, creating obvious links pages. One of my friends hired someone who did nothing but link swaps, and, in the process, prevented my friend from ranking for anything in Google other than one 7 word phrase.

Why Some People Still Think They Do:

I recently posted about how some sites engaged in broad based reciprocal linking are killing themselves in Google. The comments on that post were entertaining. After listening to some guy who goes by the name DomainDrivers comment on and on about reciprocal linking being an effective promotional technique I came to realize the disconnect which prevented him from believing the truth

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

And then some people look at a portion of the market and want to believe that what is easy for them to replicate is the answer to their problems. Kirby made an excellent blog comment about why many people read the market wrong:

The debate on reciprocal links wont end for a few reasons.

First, the rules are not evenly applied. Older sites that have built up a degree of trust with aged links will get a way with more.

Secondly, it varies from industry to industry. With real estate, there exists a perception that since the space has lots of competitors, it is therefore competitive. Not true.

Do reciprocal links work in this space? Absolutely. The reason, however, is not because of the value of these links, but because its the primary tool of the majority of sites in this space. It tends to boil down to winning a race of mediocrity. Will they win in a truly competitive space? No.

Take a site and get a handful of good quality links with only a small percentage of reciprocal links and it will beat sites like domain drivers' clients hands down.

A Life of Finite Resources:

And the problem with reciprocation is not one associated with the web. The web is just a reflection of the real world, and the problems associated with reciprocation are that each of us have finite resources, finite attention, and a finite lifespan.

Your PageRank, your authority, your reach, ... they are all finite. Chop it up and trade it again, but eventually you are just going to create weird footprints.

Do Reciprocal Links Build Brands?

On that same thread a person who signed their name as being associated with Links Manager stated the following:

Reciprocal linking should be conducted as a BRANDING function.. never as an SEO function.

But you don't build a brand by trading links. You build a brand by promoting things you like and having people who like you promote you. It is much easier to do this if you allow others to fill in your holes where they are passionate.

How to Reciprocate:

Hugh recently mentioned a killer quote

I don't bother "networking" anymore, instead, I try to build relationships with people I find interesting, and who I think are doing interesting things. And I make it my mission to help them in any way I can to achieve their mission. I find this much more satisfying, much more honorable, and much more fun. And this is the cool thing about people....When you help them out in this way, they help you out. Not because it's a tit for tat deal, but because both parties are engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship that extends beyond the next favor.

Examples of Ways People Have Helped Me:

One person reformatted my ebook just because they liked it. Another friend recommended an editor that is currently editing it to make the grammar better. Another friend wrote my sales letter. Another friend helped me launch an ad network. Another friend offered to do multivariant testing. Another friend designed my site. Another friend gave me public speaking tips. Another friend became a business partner and sat next to me while I was giving a speech to department heads at a fortune 500 company. My most popular SEO tool (SEO for Firefox) was created by a friend who I knew before I got into the web.

Passion as a Proxy for Value:

If you are hanging around bottom hangers (reciprocal link trading hubs, for example) you are valuing your time at next to nothing and are surrounding yourself with bad ideas. Everything you see or do effects how you perceive the world and how you act. And how you act also determines what and who you attract into your life. If you are passionate then passionate people will enter your life.

You are only as good as the people you surround yourself with. You build a brand by creating friendships with honest people who are doing well, and try to help them do better. I talk to some friends like Andy Hagans, Caveman, and Werty all the time, and they always give me good ideas to help me improve my site and marketing.

When you are passionate about what you do you create value beyond your income. You accumulate friendships, assets, brand value, and market influence which are worth far more than most people realize.

I still trade links sometimes, or just link to friends knowing that they may link back, but most of my link swaps are only representative of friendships, and, to me, that seems the only way to make it worthwhile.

Optimizing Pages for Link Potential or Profit Potential

Each web page can be optimized for conversion or linkability, but few pages are well optimized for both. That is part of why search as a business model works so well. The signals of quality that search engines look for are typically associated with information, not pages that convert well, thus those who have overtly conversion oriented sites and pages have to buy advertising.
You can complain to top ranking sites and complain to Google about an informational site outranking you, but other than giving them a good laugh you stand little chance of getting much out of complaining about how the system is set up.

If you and a competitor both have the same optimized sales funnel, but have sites which do not have content that inspires linking then the odds are prett good a blog or newspaper article might outrank you.

Building Authority Without Hurting Your Conversion Potential:

A search engine is going to trust whoever has more signs of trust bolted on to their offering. If you have linkbait on your site it helps boost the overall authority of every page on your site.

When Linkbait Goes Astray:

Many SEOs fail at creating a site that converts well because we integrate our linkbait content (or other spurious information) directly into the sales funnel in a way that actually makes our sites less appealing and less conversion oriented.

You can still host linkbait on your site without actively driving the attention of your audience to it during the conversion process.

Use linkbait to get the links, but don't promote it heavily on your site unless it builds consumer trust and leads them toward conversion.

Keeping Conversions on Track:

A couple of my friends recently wrote an article about using Google Website Optimizer to streamline your sales funnels.

What is This Page for?

Each page should teach, convert, or be linkworthy. If you can do all that with one page that is awesome, but with most pages and most ideas you can't be optimally effective if you try to combine them all. For most businesses it helps to keep citation-worthy linkbait and the sales funnel separate.

Yahoo! Directory Registration & Search Engine Marketing

SEO Question: Is a Yahoo! Directory registration worth it? How do I know what directories are worthwhile? What directories should I submit to? Do you have any good site submission tips?

SEO Answer: If you have a business, and are serious about SEO, I generally would recommend submitting your site to the Yahoo! Directory. There are a lot of criteria to consider.

Your Site Name:

If your site name is MyKeywords.com make sure that your site lists your company as My Keywords. Do not run the words together in your logo, in your page title or text, or in the title of your directory submission when submitting your site to important directories. By separating the words in your site name you get better anchor text because the search engine sees the separate words in your links. Descriptive links from trusted editorial sources can be seen as a sign of quality.

If your keywords are not included in your site name, and it would be easy to alter your page title and logo, you may want to consider making some of your keywords as part of your logo design and official looking site name, so that you can get those words in your submission title.

If your keywords do not look like they are part of your official branded site name do not get too aggressive with keyword stuffing unless you are willing to risk a Yahoo! Directory editor editing your business name and potentially giving you less than ideal anchor text.

SERP Analysis:

When I buy quality links I am primarily buying them for either direct traffic or the effect they may have on my Google rankings. So the place to start analyzing category analysis is the search results.

Some sites will rank well based on being deceptive, creative, and spammy, but those rankings will quickly change over time, and those are not the ideal sites to pattern your link profile after. It is better to look at the top ranking related sites which you believe are credible sites that deserve the position.

For example, if you are a retailer of a product, but most of the higher quality top ranked sites in your category are manufacturers, it might make sense to dress up your site and write your directory listing description to make it look more like you are a manufacturer which also sells goods directly rather than just a retailer, that way you can submit your site to a category that lists you alongside.

The co-citation you are buying when you chose a category is a large part of the value of a directory listing.

Site Description:

Write your site description to help reinforce your category selection. Bias it toward making your site sound relevant for the category you want to be listed in. For example, if you want to be listed as a manufacturer and are submitting to a manufacturing category make sure your description says something like manufacturer of ...

Don't put too much hype in your site description. Look at other sites listed in your category to see how they are listed. The main goal of the description is to sell the category placement, and do differentiate your site from other sites listed in your category.

Directory Category Analysis:

There are a few main criteria when considering what directory category to submit your site to.

  1. the odds of you being rejected

  2. the co-citation value
  3. the global link authority of that category (ie: PageRank)
  4. the number of listings in your category

The odds of being rejected:
The odds of your site getting rejected from a paid directory for submitting to the wrong category are going to be quite low. For a free submissions or submissions to directories ran by editors, like DMOZ, getting the category selection correct is far more important than with a paid directory.

For a paid directory you probably want to submit to the best category which is reasonably relevant to your site. If they are too liberal with category placement the directory is probably of low quality and not trusted much, but even with high quality directories usually you can fudge it a bit. And, worst come to worst, they will typically list you in the category you belong listed in even if they do not give you the placement you desire most.

Co-citation value:
The co-citation you are buying is a large part of the value you are buying when you buy a directory listing. Consider the types of sites you want to be grouped with from the above SERP analysis section.

Yahoo! paginates the directory category listings pages by popularity, so if there are over 20 listings in your category and your site is new, you may want to spend the $50 to $300 a month it costs to sponsor your category, at least until your site's popularity increases and you are one of the top 20 results in your category.

Category link authority:
Some areas of a directory are over-represented within the overall directory structure, or may be well referenced by external resources. For example, Yahoo! lists the blogs category rather high in their overall category structure. Want another example of a directory category getting a bit of overexposure?

When Yahoo! created their own search engine, their official search engine guidelines linked to their SEO resources category. Hundreds of companies listed in the SEO services category, but there were only about a dozen listings in the SEO resources category.

Number of Links in Your Category:
If your category has less than 20 links then it is clear you will be listed next to the other listings. If your site is new and your category has more than 20 links then you may need to buy a category sponsorship to be featured at the top of the category to get the desirable co-citation.

Two other things to look at with the number of links in your category:

  • If you have a top sponsorship position in your category, or if you are bootstrapping it, and your brand is not that strong yet it may be cheaper to rank your category page than to rank your site off the start.

  • If your category has few links, or the other listings are not too relevant to your business, do not expect the Yahoo! Directory editors to want to list your site there.

Submitting to Other Directories?

I still think this post from April about web directories and SEO is a good primer for considering the quality of various directories, and how search engines may evaluate them.

A couple things I would add to that post:

  • Aged sites and/or sites with clean link profiles which are well trusted in Google are given a bit more leniency on what links may count and how many bad links they can get away with. If you have an aged trusted site you may want to dig a bit deeper for links, but for newer or untrusted sites you are best off just getting links from some of the higher quality directories.

  • If you are applying to become an editor at DMOZ, or other volunteer ran directories, make sure you start with a small category and sell topical passion more than you sell your commercial interests in the topic.
  • If you submit to a directory which allows multiple deep links with your listing, like Business.com, make sure you consider what pages will earn the most. For example, I have a 600+ page site where about 20% of the earnings come from one page. Getting your top earning pages a few more links can significantly increase their earning potential, but also note that if your deep idea is an uncompetitive niche there might be other links that you can get that will not leave such an obvious roadmap for competitors.
  • If your brand or core keywords could commonly be misspelled, like Client Side SEM vs Clientside SEM, you may want to submit your site to a couple average to lower quality directories with misspelled anchor text.

Free Elite Retreat Pass

We are holding a contest offering a free ticket to attend Elite Retreat. To enter for a chance to win free registration to the Elite Retreat, those eligible can reply via email to giveaway@eliteretreat.info with their contact information (name, email address, phone number, and mailing address), and their answer to the following question:

"Why should a legitimate business need to worry about SEO?"

Please note that if you win you still have to pay for your airfare and hotel.

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