DMOZ-The open directory project. Most people related to internet (not just the SEO gurus)  have at least heard of DMOZ. It actually stands for Directory Mozilla, but has been officially renamed to the Open Directory Project. One can define DMOZ as a listing of all of the websites on the internet that have been submitted. They have been meticulously categorized and checked for authenticity before being placed in the directory.

Anyone can become an editor to help build the largest human edited directory on the web. At the same time anyone can add his/her own listings to this directory. I know almost every internet savvy knows this but this is also a fact that a lot of us still trying to get listed. Some are waiting for months after submitting their site.

The beauty of dmoz is that it’s edited by volunteers, and they are not forced in any way to carry out the job. So in most cases, after few intial active months people get occupied with other stuff and this leaves hundreds of thousands of sites on hold (begging for a review).

No doubt that DMOZ is important. If you want success and backlinks for your site, listing it with DMOZ is a great place to start. But that’s not the end, just submit your site properly, and get on with other link building techniques.

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

SEO

It’s really easy these days to create and maintain websites and above all it’s FREE. There are lots of websites or internet companies giving away free domains, subdomains, hosting, blogs etc. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com top the list.

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application. Wordpress has two flavors:

1. Create your website free on their server with some limitations (like storage, less features etc).
2. Or download Wordpress and install on your own server/hosting account. Infact most of the share hosting accounts come with installable version of Wordpress. So just click few times and have it up and running. Tons of widgets, plugins and themes available for this type of Wordpress version.

Blogger.com is owned by the big guy Google and it is highly search engine optimized. So if you do it seriously (maintain your website properly and regularly), you can have hundreds of visitors flocking to your website from Google search result.

Some more free website providers:

• Microsoft OfficeLive Small Business
• Homestead
• Angelfire – free website hosting
• Typepad.com
• Build a Free Website – Synthasite
• BlinkWeb – Free Internet Blog Or Website
• Yahoo – Geocities
• Webs.com – Free Website

This is my bit, if you have a resource worth sharing, please hit comment.

Good luck!

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Online Marketing, SEO, Tips & Tricks Blogs, Free Websites, Tips

SEO in simple words can be defined as the art of optimizing your website to ensure high rankings on search engines, thus effectively increasing the amount of traffic you get from them. SEO is the most important factor in ensuring that your website is well ranked in search engine results for search phrases that are relevant to your business. This involves a lot of hard work, but the results will pay off if you adopt a systamatic implementation strategy.

Alright! Lets move on and learn how to implement SEO – the proper way.

• Recently google has published an excellent guide about SEO – Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, download and go through it. There is no better way to start on Search Engine Optimization than the guide published by the search giant itself. I can suggest more readings but we are just starting on SEO, so lets not get confused, read, apply (a must if you are serious about learning) and move to next step.
• Signup with Google’s Webmaster Tools, they are designed to assist webmasters in indentifying SEO issues related to websites. Try to read and put into operation everything suggested to improve your website rankings. If given proper attention, they help your website tremendously to perform better in search rankings.
• Go to your Web Analytics account, go through every report, check, who is sending visitors, look for more popular pages/contents. Compare the results, is your website doing better than what you had in Step by Step SEO For Beginners – Part One.
• Time for Google Website Optimizer, run experiments, find the set of contents that work best to maximize your conversion.
• Links Links Links – If you want your website to stay, you need a steady in-flow of quality links. I am compiling a comprehensive list of link building techniques, so please visit back soon or subscribe to the RSS feed (you don’t wanna miss it, one solid piece of info, can make you thousands of dollars). Meanwhile check this out – Promotion & Link Building.
• SEO is an ongoing task, keep track of search engine ranking factors, design your own methods of promoting websites and record the results.

Believe it or not, SEO is not that big of a secret, most of the information for successful results is already available online. You just need to put the pieces of puzzle at the right places. This is where your own methods/techniques/theories jump in, test them, mold them as per constantly envolving search engine algorithems.

I tried to keep the steps as simple as possible and I am sure that if you complete all the tasks on this list you will be well on your way to becoming a successful SEO.

Your feedback is welcome, suggest anything you feel appropriate to improve this SEO guide.

Part One of this tutorial can be reached at Step by Step SEO For Beginners.

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

SEO Online Marketing, SEO

There could be shortcuts, but believe me if you seriously want to stay in the SEO game, learn it the proper way. The way to learn anything is to want to learn it, go at it, get it wrong, fix the problem, try again. However, guides like these, help and give you a head start, because you don’t have to waste time on compiling what actually needs to be learnt and in what order. Over the years I have gone through countless step-by-step guides while trying to understand search engine optimization. For starters, following is a compilation of the most useful steps towards learning SEO.

Learn how to make a basic website

Before getting into SEO techniques it’s vital to know the basics of web development. Follow the steps mentioned below to develop the necessary web development skills required to become a successful SEO:

Learn basics of HTML - Don’t step back, writing HTML is much easier than you think. If you are reading this and know how to use a web browser to load a website, you can code HTML. Try this excellent tutorial, just focus and follow.

Build a CSS driven website – All of the presentation and styles with CSS i.e. No Tables! Check this comprehensive tutorial.

Test your website in different browsers - Each browser interprets your website code in a slightly different manner, which means that it may appear differently to visitors using different browsers. While most people use Internet Explorer, a sizable portion of your users will use other browsers such as Firefox, Opera or Safari. Therefore it’s important to check your web design on different browsers to ensure all users view the webpage as it’s intended. Browsershots is a comprehensive service, offering multiple versions of browsers for various operating systems.

Choose your keywords - Getting the right keywords is everything, so be careful. You are just starting out, pick keywords that are less competitive. You might be wondering why am I choosing the keywords here (under the heading “Learn how to make a basic website “)? Well! all of the SEO game is played around the keywords. Selection of a proper domain name based on your chosen keyword plays a vital role, that’s why we are doing this step before registering a domain name.

So how do you know which keywords are good to go. This is a vast subject and needs a lots of articles dedicated solely to this section. But for the beginners, choose a keyword, say your business name, go to Google and search for yourself. If the result shows a small amount of low quality websites, use it as your keyword(s). If competition seems high (you see loads of high quality web sites) to rank for, try some variations.

Register a Domain Name & Find Suitable Hosting – This is again not as difficult as it sounds. There are tons of choices out there. I have good experience with Hostgator and WebSiteSource, you can use anyone of these. However, you are free to make your own decision, just make sure you shouldn’t be paying high and the domain name should be included for free as part of your hosting package. For your domain name, use your keywords from above. If your keywords are not available as a domain name, choose different keywords. (Although having similar keywords to your domain name makes SEO much easier.)

FTP/Upload your website files to your new hosting account - The are literally hundreds of FTP programs available on the web. I use FileZilla, the free FTP solution. FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. You many also ask your hosting provider for instructions.

Add a sitemap - It is a page (or sometimes more than one page) that contains links to all of the pages on your website. Depending on the size of your website, you can simply create a page with links to all of these pages.

However, if your site is getting large you might want to automate the building of the page, there are many tools available on the internet to allow you to build a site map. A search on any of the major search engines will bring up plenty of choice. I use xml-sitemaps, because of it’s simplicity and feature rich nature.

Sign up for Google Analytics – This free tool will help you improve website ranking by tracking visitors to your website. Applying this to your website is very easy, detailed instructions are included by Google.

Search for your keywords in big search engines – Wait for 7 days and then check how your site is ranked/positioned in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). I generally use Search Engine Positioning Tool (saves lot of time). It is fine if your website doesn’t show up at this point, however, if it does come up (congrads), record how it ranks in a spreadsheet.

Wait couple of weeks for Google Analytics to gather data and let search engines find your website (if they are still searching for it )

Part Two: Learn & apply SEO to your website

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

SEO Online Marketing, SEO, Web Development