Your content is worthless if visitors can’t find it. If they can’t find you in the directorys, that reduces their chances of being able to find your content. And they won’t be able to find you in the directorys if the spiders can’t crawl your site. Back in July, directory Land ran an article that listed some of the reasons a site may be uncrawlable. These include: * An incorrect robots.txt file. * Using session IDs or too many variables in your URLs. * A convoluted navigation menu. * Too much use of Flash, graphics, or AJAX. 36.What Every directory Optimization Company Should Know about Keyphrase Choice Knowing the Prospect There are many powerful and specific keyphrases available from which a directory optimization company can choose to bring traffic to your site. But marketing on the Internet should go beyond traffic for the sake of traffic and instead focus on getting the right traffic. A directory optimization company can target a phrase that is very popular, but 90 percent of those searching on it will not be true prospects. Or, the company can target a phrase that might be less popular in general but that is more likely to bring in the right types of prospects. Guess which is easier. Guess which is more effective. For the best results when marketing on the Internet, you can segment your prospects in three ways: * By geographic region * By level of service desired * By place in the buying cycle If you’re a regular reader of our optimization Chat newsletter, you probably saw in a recent Spotlight that Google is now treating domains and subdomains a little differently. What this means is that, if optimization considerations dominated whether you split up your content among several subdomains (i.e. trying to get as many spots in the SERPs as possible) you need to change your focus. Instead, look at it from your visitors’ point of view. Does it make sense based on the kind of content to split it up among several domains or subdomains? By Geographic Region If your business only offers services in a particular part of the country, then you don't need to be marketing on the Internet with generic phrases that will bring in people who cannot take advantage of your company. A knowledgeable directory optimization company will suggest specific phrases with geographic modifiers to bring in the traffic that will be most helpful for you. Costly optimization Mistakes You Must Avoid - A Question of Content Some of the issues surrounding content also deal with other areas of concern. For example, you want to make sure your art paintings site looks fresh and that you address your customer’s concerns, right? Apparently not every site owner worries about that, though they should. Jordan mentioned that she was once given the responsibility to rewrite the web copy of a large real estate firm, when she was working as a PR consultant. The firm had pages where customers could leave feedback. Imagine her surprise when she saw that they had let some extremely negative feedback from one of their customers sit on their feedback pages for at least a year! Somebody should have noticed that content and addressed the issues it raised. For example, the keyphrase "real estate agent" may bring in a great deal of traffic, but if you are in Georgia and the searcher is looking for a home in California, this isn't helpful. Instead, your directory optimization company would target "Atlanta real estate agent" and you would see true leads coming to your website. What about getting a link to your site from Wikipedia? The vast majority of articles in that volunteer-edited online encyclopedia do link to relevant web sites. However, Wikipedia uses rel=”nofollow” on those links, which means that they don’t get crawled by the directorys. On the other hand, those who read the article might choose to click on one of the reference links to find out more information, and a rel=”nofollow” certainly doesn’t prevent that. Just remember that if your link isn’t truly relevant, it can be removed by one of Wikipedia’s editors. Are you using images on this page? Images can really help you add more key words. Make sure you have a key word in the filename of all your images. Boost both your optimization and your page’s accessibility by adding key words to the ALT tags of your images as well. Finally, add key words to the title attribute of your images. Now let’s look at your links. This is the web after all, and everyone links to everyone else (well, ultimately anyway). So, do you have key words in the anchor text for links that go to another site? How about key words in the anchor text for an internal link from the page? If you publish lots of content, you may find that some of your authors will submit articles that link to other articles that appear on your site. This is a good thing. Next, make sure that you have key words in the title attribute of all the links targeted in and out of the page. After your first usage of the key word in the page’s first full paragraph, you can begin using it in ways that are designed to draw the eye: bold (second paragraph if possible), italic, and in a subscript/superscript. It also makes sense to use key words as part of your URL (a directory name, file name, or domain name). But do not duplicate the key word in the URL, or – you guessed it – you might set off over-optimization warning flags. By Level of Service Desired Another way to target your keyphrases when marketing on the Internet is by the level of service desired by your customers. For this, your directory optimization company will want to find out from you (or your sales department) what types of customers you attract. Naturally, if you shouldn’t waste time submitting your URL to the directorys, you also shouldn’t waste money on having someone else submit your web site to the directorys. Don’t do this even if they say that they’ll submit it to thousands of directorys and directories. That strategy might have worked five or more years ago, but it certainly doesn’t work today. The problem is, most of the directories you’re likely to get your site submitted to this way are link farms, and those do get penalized by Google. The only directories which I have consistently heard might still be worth submitting to are DMOZ and Yahoo’s directory. For example, if you are an email marketer that offers high-level packages and when you are marketing on the Internet you use the phrase "email marketing," you will again be attracting a large amount of traffic that is not really interested in your services. Your directory optimization company should instead be targeting a keyphrase like "premium email marketing," which may be less popular but will still bring in more leads than the generic phrase. Likewise, submitting your URL to directorys is a waste of time. They’ll come and index it soon enough; sooner than you might think, in fact, if you get some good links from other sites for the spiders to follow. That’s assuming you’ve set up your site so that they can crawl it (more on that in a bit). By Place in the Buying Cycle Your directory optimization company should be asking you what your goal is for marketing on the Internet. You may want to be the information source when someone is looking for your type of service, or you may instead want to be the destination when a prospect is ready to close the deal - or possibly a combination of both. Make no mistake; good backlinks are worth their weight in gold. But the good ones take real time and effort to generate. The ones that you’ll be getting for your $50 or $100 will be unrelated to your content, and therefore not counted as particularly valuable by the directorys. Besides, if your site suddenly gets tons of backlinks, that’s going to look very suspicious to the directorys, and could result in a penalty. So if you are a real estate firm that is marketing on the Internet, you have two directions in which you can go. Your directory optimization company can target phrases like "Atlanta real estate," which will bring in prospects that are early in the process and looking for general information about the area. In this case, you would want to make sure you have whitepapers and other informational pages available on your site. Costly optimization Mistakes You Must Avoid - Wastes of Time and Money Okay, if you don’t do your own optimization, I sincerely hope you know better than to hire the optimization company that just sent you an e-mail out of the blue saying that they can drastically improve your position in the SERPs. That is spam. No, you can’t buy hundreds or thousands of good links for $50; no, you can’t believe them when they say they can quickly get you a top position in the SERPs for whatever subjects you want. You can also target a phrase like "Atlanta real estate agents," which is more likely to be searched on by someone who is ready to buy a home in the area. Those searchers will come to your site ready to close the deal. A good directory optimization company will ask you the right questions before research even begins to find out which of these phrases would work better for your strategy, or to determine whether both types would give you benefits when marketing on the Internet. You can certainly put a note on the site explaining that the principals are on vacation and the business is temporarily closed, mentioning when you’ll be back – but by all means leave the rest of the site up. It will give your site a chance to climb in the SERPs, and rather than abandoning your site completely, visitors might consider what they’d like to purchase when you get back. It’s better still, of course, if you set up your site so that they can still place orders, with the understanding that you’ll fill them as soon as you can when you get back. Knowing the Company In much the same way, marketing on the Internet should involve knowing the specific goals of your company. Your directory optimization company can hone your keyphrases in three ways: * Those that bring in higher margin business * Those that boost underperforming business areas * Those that focus on new services Another situation Jordan mentioned involved one of her now ex-clients, who took her site down for three whole weeks during her Christmas vacation, without telling Jordan. She’d just spent a month getting good rankings for the site, too, which all went down the drain. A web site is not like a brick-and-mortar business. Even if you have no one there to take phone calls, the site can act as a sort of “information stand-in,” letting people know what you have to offer. Those that bring in higher margin business Your directory optimization company can focus your marketing on the Internet toward products and services that bring in the highest margin. This is preferable to treating all of your products and services, and therefore all of your keyphrases, equally. For example, you may have two lines of business - one that nets 30 percent and one that nets 70 percent. If your keyphrases focus too heavily on the business that nets 30 percent, the overall effect will be a decrease in margins across the board. Conversely, focusing on the business that nets the larger percentage will bring you an increase.
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