Build a Home Based Business from scratch selling products online using Drop Shippers.

Directory Submission  

Ok – Now your site is ready to go!

The next few chapters will look at marketing your site, an aspect of your business that will require an ongoing commitment from you.

The first part of your marketing strategy is to submit to directories. This part is crucial to your rankings, yet is overlooked by a lot of web site owners.

To help you understand the importance of directory submission, it helps to understand about page rank.

In summary, page rank is Google’s measure of a websites importance through their eyes. If you want to see a web site’s page rank you can see it by downloading Google’s toolbar.

In short, if a web site with a high page rank is linked to you, then the major search engines, such as Google, will give you a higher ranking. So for this exercise, and for the next few months or so, you are going to submit your web site to directories with high page ranks.

Visit SEOcompany (this is a list of free directories) and scroll down the page until you see a long list of directories. Then click on the PR button as shown in the diagram below.

This will list the directories in order of page rank. Most are free, so what you now want to do is submit to around 25 a week, starting from the top and working your way down to at least all the directories with a page rank of 3 or higher.

Before you do this, you need to write out six different descriptions of your site. The reason for this is because the search engines will see the new listings in each directory when they spider them. If they see multiple listings by a site that have the same description each time, they will suspect you have submitted your site by the use of software, a no-no!

When writing your six descriptions, choose to write three that do not offer any sort of advertising jargon. A good example would be – Camping World – offers online shopping and worldwide shipping of selected camping equipment. This is not like the promotional sort of text you would have used in your meta-description. Then all you need to do is re-word it two more times.

You’ll need these because some directories forbid promotional descriptions.

Do the same with your meta-description by rewording that two more times, and there you have six descriptions.

When submitting to directories, your aim is to get one-way links to your site. You’re not after reciprocal links here, because the directories are not about the same thing as your business, they’re simply directories.

When you come across a directory asking for a reciprocal link (and there will be many), just move to the next one.

Go through the directories one by one (about 20 – 25 a week) and choose the best category that suits your business, starting with www.dmoz.org. Ignore Google.com and directory.google.com, as Google is a search engine, and directory.google.com is the same as DMOZ.

DMOZ is called the Open Directory Project and is one of the largest directories. Google works very close with DMOZ and so being listed in DMOZ will help your Google rankings.

Let’s go through a directory submission in DMOZ for a site selling camping equipment.

It is vitally important that you choose the right category, as directories are controlled by humans, so if you submit to the wrong category, they are well within their rights to cancel your submission.

 If it’s not apparent which is the right category first up, type in one of your major keywords and see if they suggest categories. In our example, we’ll type in ‘camping equipment’.

From this example, you can see 5 possibilities came up. Because we are selling camping equipment, the best category would be Shopping: Recreation: Outdoors: Camping, simply because we are a site aimed at campers shopping for camping equipment.

After clicking on the category link, we are given three more specific categories, which are too specific for our site, so we’re now going to click on the ‘suggest URL’ link.

Take the time to read through the rules, policies and instructions for all directories.

The site URL is self-explanatory.

The title of your site needs to be the official title of very similar.

A short description of your business, but don’t use promotional language. If you’re unsure, have a look at all the other descriptions from the same category.

Your email address and then submit.

Tasks:

1. Write out six descriptions of your web site.
2. Visit SEOCompany, and start submitting to directories with a page rank of 3 or higher, at the rate of about 20 – 25 a week.

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