SEO experts and internet marketing professionals alike know the importance of directory submissions in a comprehensive search engine optimization plan. Not only do the one-way links provided by directory submissions increase your search engine rankings, but listings in a niche directory can drive targeted traffic your way. Before you submit your site, however, be sure you know these six things:

1. Log Your Submissions: Every time you submit your site to a directory, write it down. Simply open up a notepad document and note the name of the directory to which you submitted, the URL, the category to which you submitted your site, and the date you made the submission.

2. Use the Right Directories: There are several sites available that list SEO-friendly directories, so check those out; they’re the ones you want to use. You can also use these sites to keep up with the Google PageRank of the directories that interest you. Start by submitting your site to the directories with the highest PageRank and work your way down the list. And be sure to use niche directories to your advantage. Try shopping directories if you’re offering a physical product. Whatever your product or service, you will be able to find directories that cater directly to it.

3. Choose the Right Categories: One of the most important things you must do is choose the appropriate categories for your listing. Choose inappropriate or irrelevant categories and chances are your submission will be rejected. One way to find the appropriate categories is to search the directory using one of your keywords. The most appropriate categories are most likely the ones that appear in your search. You can also search for your competitors’ listings and submit to those same categories if you think that your website is also relevant.

4. Choose an Effective Title: Before you submit to a directory, check the guidelines regarding the title. While some directories will allow you to include keywords in your title, others will only allow you to use the official name of your company or website. Prepare several titles before you even start submitting so that you can take advantage of the directories that allow you to list keywords in your title. Be sure that you alter the title from directory to directory if possible. If you submit the same title to each directory, search engines will think that you haven’t built your links naturally.

5. Write a Good Description. Before you start submitting, write several good descriptions of your website. One should run between 15 and 25 words, and another should be around 30-50 words. Although each directory has guidelines for descriptions, most of them have this in common: Don’t use all capital letters, make sure you don’t capitalize the first letter of each word, and don’t use extraneous characters like exclamation points and asterisks. The most important thing to remember is that your description should be unbiased and factual. A description that looks like sales text will get your submission rejected right away.

6. Make Sure Your Timing is Right: Don’t submit to too many directories all at once. Instead, submit to one or two directories every couple of weeks. Search engines will consider this natural link-building rather than artificial, and artificial link-building can cause search engines to penalize you rather than rewarding you.

Directory submissions are a straightforward way to build links and drive traffic to your site. If you’re ready to take on the task yourself, rest assured that it’s a rewarding job. But don’t hesitate to hire an SEO expert or internet marketing professional to do the job for you if you need to concentrate on other aspects of your business. Either way, you’ll be thrilled with the results!

Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.

Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been adopted by all the major search engines.

There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site. 1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and 2. The Robots < Meta > Tag

The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)

This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content.

The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots < Meta >Tag.

Creating your robots.txt file

Example 1 Scenario

If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing. The robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: * Disallow:

Explanation The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable for indexing.

Example 2 Scenario

If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq, cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: * Disallow: /faq/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /faqs.html

Explanation The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will now not be indexed by any search engine spiders.

Example 3 Scenario

If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin, images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /faq/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /faqs.html

Explanation By naming the particular search spider in the “User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by Google.

That’s all there is to it!

As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be difficult to implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and the robots tag.

The Robots < Meta > Tag

This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do with site content appears in the section of a web page. A simple example would be as follows;



In this example we are telling all search engines not to index the page or to follow any of the links contained within the page.

In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page, because the site contains time sensitive information. This can be achieved simply by adding the “noarchive” directive.



What could be simpler!

Although there are other ways of preventing duplicate content from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt file and or a Robot tag combination.

Should you require further information about our search engine marketing or optimization services please visit us at www.e-prominence.co.uk – The search marketing company