How to promote your website - Part 4- What to do next

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What to do after the major directories?

OK, you have now suggested your site to the major directories, it is now time to look towards the smaller topical directories. Almost every subject has some form of topical directories, sometimes called vertical portal or "vortals" Vortals are generally a lot smaller than general web directories because they are related to a specific topic. Here is a little trick I use to find small directories for any given subject. Go to google.com and type in the following search query. "add url [your subject here]" Type your subject topic within the brackets and this little query will give you a list of pages that are related to your site subject and contain the words add url. You can fine tune this search term by altering to provide better results. you might wish to place the "add url" part of the query within double quotes"" this instructs the search engine that this phrase is required. There are a few other variations of this search term. I will show you some here.

add url [site topic]
"add url [site topic]
add site [site topic]
"add site" [site topic]
gossamer [site topic]


In example five I used the word "gossamer". This can sometimes be a useful term because a lot to smaller web directories use software from a company called gossamer threads to run their directories. Very often the word gossamer will appear on the directory page. If you are able to find pages with your subject topic and the word gossamer then the chances are you have found a suitable directory to add your site to.


The process of adding your site to smaller directories is an on-going process. In general these sites will not send you a lot of traffic but will pass on some page rank. The more page rank you can accumulate the higher your chances are of ranking well on Google. If you rank well on Google you will also rank well of some of the webs premier locations such as yahoo and AOL. Eat sleep and dream about page rank. You want it, you need it so go get it.


What you have to be very wary of is where you are submitting. There are places that are not worth the time taken to submit and can actually cause you harm. The main cause for concern for any web promoter has to be link farms and FFA pages (free for all links pages) In general these places work by adding your link for free in exchange for you linking to their page. The best way to avoid this is to never add your site to anywhere that insists you return the link. Linking to a link farm or FFA page could be the kiss of death for your web presence. On the subject of linking the Google toolbar can be a very useful tool for deciding if you should link to another site. The page rank will be displayed on the toolbar. If you see a site with a page rank zero and a gray bar then the chances are this site has some form of penalty for an offence. You also need to be very cautious so as avoid the possibility of getting penalized yourself.


There are a lot of services and websites that offer to submit your site to xxxxxxx number of search engines for a set price or sometimes for free. Avoid these services like the plague there are not that many search sites on the web and of the ones that exist only about 30 matter. Most of these sites will add your site to FFA and link farm pages and all you can be assured of is an in box full of spamm email after you submit. Do all of your search engine and directory submissions manually.

Here is a short list of some of the more popular "illegal" things that can lead to a Google penalty.


Linking to a bad neighborhood: Placing links on your site that link to places Google conceders bad. This could lead to the penalty being passed to your site.


Hidden text: This is where you place text in your site that is the same color as your background therefore making the text invisible to your users but not to search engines. This means that the search engine will view your page and see if filled with your keywords whereas the user will view your page and see your true content.


Cloaking: This is where you set up your site to display a different page to search engines and users so the search engine will see a well optimized page and your users will see a standard page.


Keyword stuffing: This is where you use a section of your page to cram it full of keywords that your users may be searching for. This is still very common place on the web. You will often see sites using the bottom of their pages to cram in as many keywords as possible.


There are probably many, many more illegal activities that will lead to a Google penalty but Google do not publish any info about this subject so I have chosen only to include the common knowledge ones.