Yes they are!! Two of the most important site directories are Open Directory Project and Yahoo! Directory. Open Directory Project or simply ODP is totally free. This is the chief explanation why it takes a long while to have your website stored in the directory. Never lose hope.

The best things life are free, correct?

To avoid from being banned in the site directory, do not resubmit your site in no less than six weeks. For being the largest human edited directories on the entire web, Yahoo! Directory is the greatest rival of ODP. Yahoo! Directory doesn’t charge non-commercial sites but commercial sites are charged with $299 per year. Having an all-inclusive directory of the web is really hard. That’s the reason why Yahoo! Directory charges hundred dollars every year. It’s always inadequate to work on all the websites even if Open Directory Project has fifty thousand editors.

Niche specific directories mainly focus on quality over quantity. One of the advantages of using niche specific directories is it provides static links going to your website. Another benefit is it also improves the relevancy of the site when it comes to search results. Various niche specific directories are at no cost.

There are site directories claiming to offer best indexing services and yet they place your site into not so organized categories and call it a directory. Google eventually ban the sites listed to this fake directory. There are duplicate directories with one webmaster and numerous domain names.

To be able to avoid misuse of money in the future, make sure to conduct a research and investigation because the fact that site directories are not spending money for advertising and branding purposes, they are not worth of your trust.

Site directories are not much of help nowadays in terms of getting high traffic nowadays. Few people are searching via directories today because they find search engine results more reliable especially when rendered by an organic SEO company and specific when searching for a particular topic.

A huge chunk of your seo, eighty percent, comes down to your off page optimization. Google is all about other people saying ‘He’s about wine supplies.’ It’s important to get these SEO basics right, but you’ll get greater return by spending your time getting off page optimisation.

Now we’ll talk about off page optimisation. We have a website we are trying to rank for wine supplies. Off page optimisation is all about what people are saying about you. What determines what other people are saying about you is the links and words that other people are using when they link to you. Off page optimisation is all about getting links to your page. You want as many links pointing to your page as possible that contain the keyword that you’re optimising for.

We need to think of different strategies to get those inbound links. Some links have more value than other links. For example, a link from Dan Murphy’s.com, a wine seller in Australia, to our website saying wine supplies, is going to be worth more because they’ll have other people sending links to them. They have more power than other smaller websites with much fewer links. There are different ways to get these links. Let’s go through some of these ways.

But before that, we will talk about sending the links. We try to replicate what happens in nature. It is not natural to have every link point to this website saying wine supplies. When we think of Dan Murphy’s, every link pointing to Dan Murphy’s isn’t going to be saying cheap wines online. What is natural is for people to link with a variety of keywords and also to link to the url. That’s where a lot of people go wrong. You want to make sure you send links to this site with your url because that’s how people think naturally when they post links on their blogs. They might link with the fully resolved url (the domain name) and that will be their link.

Anchor text is the text that is used in the link itself. We could have a link on a website saying wine supplies, and it’s selected through the anchor text. Even though it is wine supplies, that will link through to the specific page which might be the full url I was talking about. It’s also important to have links that link the anchor text, being yourdomain name. You would also link some of your secondary keywords. You would probably look at seventy percent as your keyword, so seventy percent as winesupplies. You then want to look at twenty percent to be your url, and then look at ten percent for variations. This forms the basis of your off page optimization strategy.

SEO for beginners and first time webmasters can be time consuming. The average webmaster likes to talk about their most important keywords. These words are usually the most competitive, have the highest volume, and are the most broad in scope. Very few webmasters know enough about SEO to really do anything about important keywords.

These often overlooked search terms, that are so important to a website’s placement in the search rankings, are a vital component of any search engine optimization (SEO) effort.

Without keywords for the search engines to index, there would be nothing to find in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Keywords are the function of the search engines. As a result of those searches, the your most important keywords are what lead potential customers to your web pages Take care of your keywords, and they will take care of you.

The importance of keywords to a website is felt in two ways. The first area of consideration, when writing the on page and off page content, is keyword placement on the page. Where the keywords are located is important, to varying degrees, with the major search engines.

The second area of importance for keywords is their density on the page. How many keywords appear on the page, makes a difference to all of the search engine algorithms. The choice of which keywords to target on a page is often of vital importance, especially for highly competitive keywords.

Keyword factors for consideration

SEO for beginners usually focuses around one engine, Google. Each search engine, from industry dominant Google, to Yahoo, to Bing, to the various other search engines, has a different keyword calculation. Some search engines permit heavier keyword numbers and density on the page, while some like Google, have much stricter allowable density levels. The placement of keywords, in any number of locations on the page, has different results in the various search engines as well.

Consideration must also be given to such additional on page keyword modifications as bolding, italic, and actual keyword type size used. Other important factors include the use of page titles, and their relative importance to the various search engines, as keyword delivery vehicles.

Consideration has to be given to the incoming link anchor text to a web page. Any content linked off page is, in fact, part of the receiving page’s total content. Taking into consideration, both the placement and density of a web page’s keywords, will pay dividends for any website owner. Fortunately, keywords can be used in such a way as to propel a site higher in the search engine rankings.

While there are certainly no magic formulas, a few common sense ideas will pay off for most web pages. Check back for Part 2 where you will find out how to laser target your keywords in an effort to rank in the major search engines!

Laser targeting the keywords

When planning which keywords to target on a page, a plan of action
should be the first step. Be sure to choose only one, or two at most
two keyword, for the focus of your efforts. In highly competitive
keyword situations, no more than one keyword should be the topic on
any page.

Keep the long term goal in mind, of ranking high for a particular
keyword or keyword phrase. To score high for that selected search
term, a serious effort is essential. Think one keyword, with
accompanying phrase, maximum for each page. In a competitive search
field, the single keyword approach is the only one worth employing,
if you want to rank well at all.

The site’s home page and internal pages should have slightly
different focus, but should be created with the overall goal in mind.
This is especially important for highly competitive keyword
situations. Often a series of pages, each one supporting the others
in an overall theme, is necessary to provide added keyword power.
Since low, medium, and highly competitive keyword conditions require
differing strategies, they need individual consideration.

For low competition search terms, there is no real need to
concentrate a page’s entire effort on a single keyword. In fact, it
might not be the best practice in that case at all. A beginner webmaster
can target two or even three low competition keywords on a page.

With few webmasters targeting those search terms, the page can be
focussed on all of them, ensuring the page be found by many different
searches. Of course, not all keywords are that easily optimized.

Moderately competitive keywords comprise perhaps the largest category
of search terms. A helpful practice, in the case of medium level
difficulty keywords is to use them all on the home page. By placing
the keywords front and center on the website’s home page, they become
the focus of several themes on the site.

Each targeted keyword should then be provided with individually
linked, and theme clustered internal supporting pages. By providing
additional theme and topic related pages, the keywords are given
extra support, and overall on and off page density.

For highly competitive keywords, much more concentrated effort must
be applied, to the highly sought after search term. In heavy
competition, only one keyword per page may be targeted. Any more than
that, and the page’s keyword focus is lost. The entire effort of that
page must be on that one all important search term.

Many additional focussed pages, perhaps even starting on the path to
an authority site, must also be created to support that highly
competitive keyword as well. The object is to create a powerful
website theme, built around that single keyword. Anything less, and
the site will be unable to compete for that term at all.

Regardless of the level of competition, it’s a good idea to become
dominant in as many search terms within the site’s topic as possible.
Once top search rankings are achieved with an important keyword, move
to the next one. The more keywords you have, the more paths are
available to enter the website, resulting in huge increases in
visitor traffic.

Visit the SEO Lair Blog for more information on SEO for beginners including keyword density, Twitter, Algorithms, and more!