Directory Submissions

For the past couple of hours, I’ve been getting down to directory submissions. In the past, I’ve done the whole “reciprocal linking” thing but, with playsolidpoker.com, I’m trying to focus strictly on one way links. I’ve realized a few things regarding SEO and it’s not all about backlinks, but that’s for another post.

I found this list while checking out digitalpoint and it got me started down the slow road of submitting to directories. I’m being very picky, trying to only pick quality directories with decent PR. I have submitted to a few of the lower PR directories (PR isn’t everything after all) due to the fact that they were heavily indexed in G.

Remember: A backlink doesn’t count unless the page it’s on is indexed.

The directory at http://www.avedirectory.com/ is one such directory. Zero PR, but lots of pages indexed by google. Perfect example of why PR from Google doesn’t matter (at least not that little toolbar).

Interesting Sidenote: If you are new to blogging these terms are an absolute must.

General SEO

I’ve learned quite a lot in the first year of internet marketing, one of the biggest things is SEO.  Short for search engine optimization, SEO is probably the most important tool when it comes to internet marketing.  You can build the best website in the world, with tons and tons of useful information but if no one finds it and uses it, you’ve wasted your time.

Take playsolidpoker.com, for instance.  This site is optimized, in every aspect, for the search engines.  From the url structure, to the internal linking within the site, it is completely perfect in every way.  I have, of course, used wordpress as the backbone of the site.  However, it has been tweaked so much, you can hardly notice it.

WordPress is famous for the SEO, but there are a few things that you must do to improve it even further.  Here is a short list of the most important “tweaks” for SEO purposes:

1. Permalinks – under option, permalinks.  You must use search engine friendly urls.
2. Title tags – wordpress needs some tweaking here, but this plugin will take care of that for you.
3. Interlinking – the more links to your pages, the more of a chance that the SEs will find it.  This Related Posts plugin, takes care of that for you and it’s fully customizable.
4. Other Tweaks – These are not completely required, in my opinion, but they go a long way to helping you finish the job.
   • Stattraq – an advanced blog statistics plugin
   • Most Popular Posts – a “plugin within a plugin” that uses Stattraq to display the most popular posts.

Using these plugins and doing a few tweaks will go a very long way to helping you improve your search engine rankings, thus increasing your traffic.