www.internetmarketingforbusiness.us How to use Articles, blogs, forums, discussion groups, and directories to improve your web sites SEO. What sites work best and how to save time and money outsourceing this.

Maybe you are a Doctor or a lawyer. You’ve built an excellent
web site that looks good, has the potential to make huge sales
and is well optimised for the search engines. You have arranged
a large number of reciprocal links, you have submitted to all
the free directories you could find and submitted articles
wherever you could. Now it’s time to sit down, relax and wait
for the traffic to come flooding in? NO.

As the internet expands it is becoming harder and harder for
even the most excellent of web sites to rank well with the
search engines. These days it would appear that getting a large
number of quality backlinks, with good anchor text, is not a do
once and forget operation. Your competitors are out there
building links daily so you must keep up.

With the huge and growing number of people online looking for
goods and services amongst the mass of related websites, niche
directories are coming into play.

Niche directories are usually much smaller and have far fewer
listings than regular paid directories and are almost without
doubt a lot slimmer than the mass of free directories on the
internet. As a webmaster, this is great news as it makes gaining
a good, relevant and visible link to your site a lot easier. For
visitors, your potential customers, a niche directory offers a
handy way of finding what they are looking for quickly and
easily.

Although there may be a small cost in submitting to niche
directories, their benefit to your site can potentially be huge,
offering far greater ROI than, say, a Yellow pages advert or
more expensive advertising on a large web site in your genre.

If you feel it is time to gain a Niche Listing for your
site then here is a handy categorised list of Niche
Directories

Writing articles and publishing them in article directories as for instance ezinearticles.com is one of the most powerful traffic driving techniques – described here in lesson number 7 of Kasia Greco’s Online Video Training Series for Complete Newbies to the Internet

Anyone who’s researched SEO or internet marketing knows that the quickest and best way to increase your search engine ranking is to build up your inbound links. And smart business owners know that directory submissions are one of the best ways to get inbound links. Inbound links are valuable because search engines essentially consider each link a “vote” for your site. The more votes you have, the higher your search engine ranking will be. Search engines also place a premium on one-way links. That’s not to say that reciprocal links are worthless, but they are much less valuable than one-way links, and directories are a great way to get one-way links.

You may be wondering whether it’s more beneficial to submit your site to general directories or to niche directories. The answer is that both are beneficial. General directories work to your advantage because they tend to be older and more well-established than niche directories, and search engines give more weight to links from older, more reputable sites. Niche directories are also great because they drive targeted traffic to your site even more than do general directories. So submit to both because both will pay off for you in the end.

As you continue considering how to select directories to which you can add your URL, ask the following 6 questions:

1. What is the directory’s PageRank? The higher the directory’s PageRank, the more value it is given by the search engines. General directories that have been around for awhile will usually have a higher PageRank than niche directories, but don’t let that stop you from using niche directories since they drive targeted traffic to your site. If you’re considering using paid directories, don’t pay for a listing in a directory with a PageRank less than 5.

2. What kinds of backlinks are in the directory? Are the backlinks located within the directory from real sites or are they for sites from which the directory has purchased ads?

3. How old is the directory? As mentioned earlier, search engines give greater weight to links from websites that are considered authoritative within the online community. Even if you’re going to submit yours site to some niche directories, be sure to also submit your site to directories that have been around awhile.

4. What’s the quality of the other submissions? If the other sites listed in the directory look like spam, or if they look like they are miscategorized, avoid the directory altogether. It probably doesn’t have a high-quality directory manager and it probably isn’t very selective about listings. As a result, it probably doesn’t have a great reputation in the online community. Don’t associate with it.

5. How much does it cost? Is the PageRank high enough for your investment? Does the quality match the price?

6. Is the company that runs the site reputable? Find out the name of the company that runs the site using whois.com. Research the company as much as possible. If it has dozens of cookie-cutter directories, stay away from it. It’s probably more interested in making money than in providing a high-quality service.

If you’re still not sure how to go about choosing a directory in which to list your website, consider consulting an SEO expert or an internet marketing professional. He or she will be able to tell you which directories are reputable and which directories are best avoided, as well as which niche directories are worth your investment. He or she may even submit your site on your behalf!

Do your research, pick some great sites, and enjoy the benefits of using directory submissions to jump-start your internet marketing strategy. You’ll see increased traffic to your site and increased search engine ranking, both of which are keys to a successful business.

Want to promote your web sites or products or services? Targeting an audience and driving traffic is a difficult task to achieve with so many web pages proliferated throughout the internet. Competition is often fierce which makes it even more difficult to connect with potential visitors and clients. Online business owners quickly recognize how difficult it is to attract anyone to their web sites. With complicated search engine algorithms that list only the most popular sites on the first few pages of search results, it can be discouraging for new web site owners who often give up after sensing failure.
To level the playing field, writing effective articles has become the equalizer. Writing informational articles present web surfers who are looking for specific information alternate ways to come across the content they need. That exchange creates unique visitors looking for even more information. Those new leads which were referred by targeted articles can quickly become sales.

Article submission allows anyone to promote and grow any web site by writing interesting content. The internet is all about information. Searchers looking for specific information or products are poised to become customers. Articles can educate and deliver just the information a searcher is looking for. That in turn rewards the author with a new visitor and potential long-term subscriber or customer.

When used wisely, starting an article writing campaign can be used to promote nearly anything and make any business just as viable as larger businesses with large advertising budgets.

Using Article Submission Services Have Three Main Benefits:

A well written article about a single topic, product, service or niche subject is more likely to be discovered during internet searches. A highly targeted article will rank better in internet searches than a new web site as a whole will.
Content submitted to submission sites and directories aid in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That is because one of the benefits is that authors should credit themselves for writing the article and provide links (url’s) back to the root web site so that readers can find even more information and possibly act and make purchases. The links included into articles become inbound links pointing at the author’s site(s). In SEO, the more quality inbound links that point to a specific web page, the more popular that page becomes and further increases visibility during internet search results. So it stands to reason that the more articles that are written and made available to web surfers, the more visitor traffic a web page will receive from both the article itself and from higher search engine rankings.
The third benefit of using article directories lies in the fact that articles can be republished unlimited times by other webmasters who find the content useful and decide to republish on their sites. With links to the original author’s site(s) still embedded within the article, each time that the content is republished generates additional inbound links and further aids in SEO.

How to Use Content Submission Services:

Article writing is just one of the many tools used to promote a product, service or web page. To use article writing effectively, one must consider writing tens of articles, if not hundreds, on specific topics to increase online presence. A methodical way to grow over a period of time is to adopt a strategy of submitting 5-10 articles per week to keep the topic fresh. Well written articles that are properly targeted with keywords will have a direct impact on increased site traffic with reliable unique visitors.