March 2017 ~ Free Links, Tools & Websites for SEO

How Effective is Directory Submission for SEO?

Directory Submission is one of the finest strategies for your site to get popular on the World Wide Web. It is the fundamental step taken by marketers to improve the link popularity of a site. This easy to do method helps in gaining quality one-way incoming back links, which will play a crucial role in search engine optimization procedures. The quality of the incoming links greatly enhances search engine rankings and internet visibility of the website. In other words, Directory Submission refers to the process of adding your site to a web directory. The whole procedure involves submitting your site URL along with other details of the website to the most appropriate category/subcategory.

The charges for performing directory submission for a website URL mainly depends on the number of directories it uses. When you submit links to directories it acts as the directions for the search engines. The more the frequency of links in website, the more will be internet visibility and rankings. As the ranking of your site increases, search engines visit your page more frequently considering it the most important, appropriate and relevant website.

Importance of Directory Submission

Directory submission plays an essential role in promoting new ventures as the websites gain global recognition on the internet through this technique. With this useful technique, you not only gain volume traffic but also targeted traffic which helps website to be at the top and get popular in the search engines. Therefore, visitors having an interest in a website will visit it through the links in the directory which engage more visitors by pulling their attention.

Types of Directory Submission

Basically, there are three major types of directory submission which are:

Basic Directory Submission

This kind of directory submission enables you to use single URL, multiple titles and single description to be submitted to different directories. This is ideal if you target for specific keywords.

Normal Directory Submission

The normal form of directory submission allows you to use multiple descriptions along with single URL and multiple titles. This is useful if you want to naturalize the backlinks generated.

Multiple URL Directory Submission

It allows the users to use up to 10 internal URLs within the same website along with multiple descriptions and multiple titles. This is highly suitable for spreading backlinks to different pages of the same website.

What is the Use of Directory Submission in SEO?

· Directory submissions give you one-way links

· Get quality and safe backlinks:

· Directory submissions send you targeted traffic

· Directory submissions are mostly free

· Helps in permanent listing in others website

· Directory submissions allow the anchor text of your choice

· Guarantees in effective search engine indexing

How to do Directory Submission for SEO?

Step: 1 Pre-submission work.

Create a notepad file and save the following there.
Blog URL, Title, Meta Contents
Blog’s RSS feed URL,
Social profile links.
And a brief description of the website (most of the directories need this.)

Step: 2 Find lists of blog directories.

Step: 3 Choose the blog directories based on domain authority, no. of indexed pages in Google etc.

Step: 4 Choose a relevant category for your submission.

Step: 5 Dig deeper to choose an accurate sub-category.

Step: 6 After selecting category click on submit your site, add links, submit link …

Step: 7 Fill on the details from the notepad file

Step: 8 Submit.

Done!

Certain tips to do it safely

Do not submit your website to the wrong category.

Always prefer to add in a sub category.

Do not spam a directory (multiple submissions). Always keep track of the submitted directories to avoid multiple submissions.
Do not provide wrong physical address or blog stats.
Do not prefer submitting to a site that requires a reciprocal link back or banners on your site. Having badges and link backs to the directories may harm website’s SEO score. So stay safe.

Make sure that you have a long term plan that you execute every month to improve your search engine rankings. Try submitting your website to at least 100–200 directories every month depending on how competitive your niche is.

Importance of Social Bookmarking in Link Building and SEO

Social bookmarking was first thought of in April of 1996, with the launch of the very first social bookmark, itList.com. From that point on, the business began to grow, and social bookmarking became known for building relevant links, bringing in quality traffic and new customers.

Definitely these social bookmarking websites have a lot of effect in SEO. It'll help your website for better crawling and indexing. Although these are “no follow” links but the links from trusted and authorized site will help you to increase your website's Trust flow. The concept of social bookmarking can be compared to personal bookmarks, or favorite lists. These networks allow people to add links they like, not just their own. Social bookmarking can be used by anyone, but is generally utilized for business to business information, or business to consumer information.

When a link is ready to be put into a social bookmarking network, it is first tagged or submitted to a social bookmarking website. It is tagged with three keywords that are optimized on the website, and then a description of the website is added. From that point on, it can be searched through the keywords on the network.

Since social bookmarking tools are accessed on the web or via a web-based application, this means you can save a new bookmark using one device, access your account on another device and see everything you added or updated from your other device. As long as you're signed into your social bookmarking account, you'll have the most recently updated version of all your bookmarks and other customizable information.

How Does Social Bookmarking Affect Your Rank?

Regularly building social bookmarks increases your domain authority, which makes it easier for you to rank for keywords relevant to your business and industry. However, there are several qualities of social bookmarks that go into determining how much of an authority boost your website gets from them.

Accelerated Website Indexing

Adding social bookmarks to the web, which help direct Google’s bots in the right direction, accelerates this process of indexation, which means your content gets found faster and will rank sooner than if you had no bookmarks.

Improved Social Signals

Social bookmarks also count as social signals, which Google uses to determine how popular your brand is among the public. For example, if you have a piece of content that is shared on Facebook 1,000 times; it’s going to increase your domain authority. Social bookmarks work the same way; if you have a history of producing content that results in a high number of shares, likes, or interest, you’ll receive a boost in authority and rank.

Higher-Authority Backlinks

Social bookmarks usually feature a link back to the original website

Referral Traffic

Social bookmarking will incidentally increase the total amount of traffic to your website via referrals. Successful social bookmarking strategies can drive thousands of new visitors every month.
The process of social bookmarking has a handful of best practices that must be followed if you want to see great results.

Look for quality. Authority matters. High-authority passes a correspondingly high amount of authority. Low-authority social bookmarking websites could actively damage your domain authority and reduce your rank.

Don’t skimp on your profiles. Each social bookmarking website will give you the chance to claim a profile and fill out information about yourself. Don’t ever leave a field unfilled! The more information you fill in, and the more consistent you are with it across the web, the better indexed your website will be with Google.

Engage with others. Social bookmarking is much like social media marketing. If you want to be successful, your best bet is to build a community. Start engaging with other users of your core social bookmarking platforms, and give back to the community whenever you can.

Stay active. It’s not enough to submit a handful of links and be done with it. Social bookmarking is best implemented as a recurring, long-term strategy. Make it a point to build new social bookmarks on at least a weekly basis, and don’t abandon any of your profiles.
What Websites Are Known Social Bookmarks?

There are many websites out there that are known as social bookmarking websites, or define social bookmarking. These websites are meant strictly to list these links and make them searchable. Some of these websites are private and you have to pay a fee to search through them, but others are free for anyone to use, obviously looking for regular people to use them. Some of these social bookmarking websites are:

Technorati.com – A blog and business social bookmarking website
Del.icio.us – A popular social bookmarking service that is the most famous
Yahoo Bookmarks – A bookmarking service hosted by Yahoo.com as one of their many services
Google Bookmarks – Another bookmarking service hosted by Google.com and intended for normal people as well as businesses to use.

Keep a close eye on your organic search traffic as well as your referrals traffic, and take note of which social bookmarking platforms tend to enable your content to perform its best.

Is Blog Commenting for SEO a Waste of Time?

Blog commenting is one of the easiest ways to get backlinks to a new or old website. In fact, an effective blog commenting strategy will make sure your backlink graph remains constant or go up with time. Find blogs related to your brand with proper keyword and while commenting do suggest your website link if it is helpful for the blogger.

By Blog commenting you will get,

Website traffic as well as,

Back-links.

If you possess certain criteria while doing blog commenting, then you can gain a lot with this link building method. Quality is important while doing this, not the quality of links build. Concentrate on .gov, .org and .edu links, Google rate these backlinks as high quality while crawling and analyzing the backlinks. I will explain some important criteria here with which you can easily find high quality links where you can build links. Just follow the methods as it is!!

Blog Commenting Criteria:

Inspect a webpage and make sure that the website is Follow.
MOZ Values must be (DA>40 & PA>25)
Skip WebPages with External value 75 or above.
Skip WebPages with multiple comment pages for “oldest comment first” types (more than 2 comment pages in case of blogs and more than 5 comment pages in case of forums)
Skip WebPages that are classified in bad neighborhood*.

*Bad Neighborhood:

Sites with the following content: Porn, Viagra, xanax, casino, slots, bingo, roulette, poker, baccarat, escorts, escortservices, vigora, spielen & vigrx etc.

Browser Extensions used:

Ø Linkparser, for checking Follow/ NoFollow.

Ø SEOquake, for finding external in SERP’s.

Ø Proxyswitchy, for switching proxy when we hit SPAM.

Ø Multi High Light for knowing Bad N keywords.

Ø MozBar for checking DA/PA

Blog Finding Methods

Method 1

By searching generic comments used by spammers in Google, bing in quotes (“”). On the SERP’s we select the web pages that are Follow and check for all other criteria’s like external, BAD N, etc.

Eg: “This is my first time visit here. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not only one having all the enjoyment right here!”

Method 2

Using special codes in Google. Search for the below phrases on Google. Replace ‘keyword’ tag with our targeted keyword (e.g. snoring, Microsoft, SEO etc.).

Example: Change “Your Keyword” with the niche keyword that you prefer,

Your Keywords +Blog
site:.com inurl:blog “niche” “leave a comment”
“Add comment” Your Keywords
“Post comment” Your Keywords
“Write comment” Your Keywords
Your Keywords “leave a comment” / “leave comment”
Your Keywords “Notify me of follow-up comments?”+”Submit the word you see below:”
Your Keywords “Remember my personal information” + “Notify me of follow-up comments?”
Your Keywords “Notify me of follow-up comments”
Your Keywords “This site uses KeywordLuv”
Your Keywords “Enable CommentLuv”
Your Keywords “You can use these tags”
Your Keywords “Powered by BlogEngine.NET”
Your Keywords “Allowed HTML tags:”
Your Keywords “top commenter”
Your Keywords “This site uses KeywordLuv”
Your Keywords “Enable CommentLuv”
inurl:keyword “commentluv”

Before Commenting:

Make sure to follow the below given things.
Actually read the post
Aim for three sentences minimum (or 40 words)
Use a real name as often as possible
Link to internal pages and social profiles

In blog commenting, links can be added in two ways.

Follow from name
Follow from comment body

Follow From Name

In this method, we add a keyword in the name field and URL in the website field. Keep in mind that we do not add links in comment body section because getting multiple links from a single comment is always spammy.

Follow From Comment Body

Here, we add links in the comment body section using “<ahref” tag or the formatting options in the comment body.

Generally, there are 5 best practices that we advise:

Target Relevant Websites

It’s always a mistake to comment for the sake of commenting. Businesses should only invest their time leaving comments on relevant websites, which will drive targeted audiences from similar niche.

Leave Thoughtful Comments

Just as the quality of the content in that particular article, the comment you write also should be of the same quality. Each comment should be thoughtful and relevant. In other words: it should be an actual comment, not something generic or an appreciating one.

Example for a generic comment: “This is my first time visit here. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not only one having all the enjoyment right here!”

Don’t Advertise

Some folks advertise their business (or a product/service) in their comments. This is almost always a mistake, because it looks unprofessional – and it often leads to the comment being deleted, and the commenter being banned from the website. The only exception is if the article, or another commenter, raises a question or identifies a problem that a business can authentically solve. In this way, it’s not advertising: it’s simply being helpful.

Use Naked Links or Branded Links

Other than building links from keywords, we should concentrate on naked links and branded links as well. Naked links are simply URLs, like www.xyandz.com. And branded links are the name of a business, like XY and Z . As you can see, both naked links and branded links are very transparent. There is no confusion as to where people will end up if they click either option.

One Link per Comment

It’s almost never a good idea to have more than one link per comment. The only exception is if the comment itself simply demands more than one link. For example, a business may have two websites: one for businesses, and one for consumers. If as part of leaving an organic, honest and thoughtful comment it’s necessary to provide both links, then that’s OK.

By following these methods, I am getting enough ranking with the targeted keywords. Comment on this if there know any more methods which works effectively based on the latest algorithm. Good luck!

How to Use Guest Blogging for SEO

Guest blogging is a method used by bloggers to increase blog traffic where bloggers write posts to be published on other bloggers' blogs. Guest blogging can work in one of two ways:

You write a post to appear on another person's blog.
Another person writes a post to appear on your blog.

It's an opportunity to take your expertise and share it with others, as well as an opportunity to increase traffic to both parties’ blogs. Guest blogging is also a great way to establish yourself as an authority figure within your market and build relationships with other bloggers and experts within your field.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Positioning yourself as an authority and well-known name in the industry.
Getting exposure (traffic) back to your website.
Building backlinks to your website.

With the right kind of content on the top blogs, you can do all three of these things. If you are trying to accomplish either #1 or #2, then you will want to find blogs that have a good sized and engaged audience. If you are just trying to accomplish #3, then you need to pinpoint blogs with strong root domain authority.

Step 1: Find Guest Post Sites

#1: Google Search Strings

Search strings you can use to find guest blogging opportunities with ease:

Keyword “guest post”Your Keyword “write for us”Your Keyword “guest article”
Keyword “guest post opportunities”
Keyword “this is a guest post by”
Keyword “contributing writer”
Keyword “want to write for”
Keyword “submit blog post”

#2: “My Guest Posts” Pages

Some bloggers love to share the places that they’ve been published.
Here’s how to find them:

Keyword “my posts on other blogs”
Keyword: “guest post”
Keyword “my guest posts”
Keyword “my guest blogs”

#3: Google Reverse Image Search

Find a competitor website that tends to guest post on a lot of high-quality blogs in your niche. Grab the URL of their headshot and pop it into Google reverse image search:

And you’ll get a list of places they’ve guest posted.

#4: Twitter and Google +

Move on to Twitter search and enter your search string like this: “Keyword” + guest post
Go through the results and find out potential guest posting targets. You can follow a similar process over at Google+ as well.

#5: AllTop.com

Enter your keyword and you’ll get a list of the niche’s best sites. From this top list you can find those who accept guest posts.

#6: From Blog Comment

Ask users who comment on your blog whether they’d accept a post on their site. They’ll usually say yes after all they liked your content enough to comment on it.

#7: Pre-Made Lists

Search Google to find out guest posting opportunities which other bloggers have already found and listed online.

Step #2: Research Your Targets

Always Prefer Quality

High quality guest post writing is a resource intensive process. Don’t waste your precious time on low quality blogs.

In general you want sites
Have an authoritative link profile
Are related to your site
Only post high quality content
Have a real following
Can bring you targeted traffic
Won’t bury your link in an author bio area far below your content
Have a significant amount of Twitter followers and Facebook fans

Find the Perfect Guest Post Topic

You need a topic that fits their site, if you can write content that speaks to their audience you’ll have no problem whatsoever getting your post accepted.

Here’s how to find the perfect topic:

Audience Knowledge Level: If you’re about to write a guest post about SEO, you need to know who you’re writing for before you set pen to paper.
Outdated Information: Check for popular articles on the site that are a bit out of date. Write a similar piece with updated content.
Read Published Guest Posts: What have other people posted already? This will give you an idea of what the site owner looks for.
Recent Stuff: Avoid writing similar contents multiple times. Keep it fresh as much as you can.

Guest Post Guidelines

Some bloggers have really, really specific guidelines which is very important in case of rejecting a post. Some are there to standardize their posts and others are there to make sure people actually read them. Either way, it’s important that you read them. Because there’s nothing worse than writing up a 1200-word article, only to have it rejected because of a 1000-word limit.

Step#3: The Approach

Most of the guest posting is done through emails. So you need to keep a standard while send these emails. Follow below approach while sending emails:

Starts off with something specific about THEIR SITE
Short and sweet (aim for 150 words or less)
Gives them specific topics to choose from (less work for them)
Touches on your experience and published work

After getting the reply, send a complete article of the selected topic.

Step #4: The Post

Add the link appropriately after reading the guidelines. Always remember to write good or better content than what you post on your own site. The authority sites which we found out are authorities because they only post quality stuff.

Some of the tips to create a website friendly post are:

A valuable source of information: The first thing to remember about a great guest post is that it is not about your business, your products, or your services. Guest posts should be valuable sources of information – not advertisements!
Format posts like the ones on the site: Make sure that your post has similar elements to match other posts on the site.
Include internal and source links: Include appropriate links to the keywords added in the post.
Include a call to action for comments: At the end of your amazing guest post, be sure to Include a call to action for comments. The more discussion your post generates, the better!

Step #5: Follow Up

You need to do something to get the most from every guest post, some are:

Actively Respond to Comments
Promote Using Your Social Media Channels
Send a Thank You Note

When the goal is traffic, the results of your guest blogging should definitely be measured. The best way to do this is to create an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics.