Submit5.com SEO Blog

We, as a link-building company often receive orders for directory submission or article promotion with keywords, simply thought out. While, it would take us plenty of time to sit down & work on the keywords to identify it – we do inform our customers when we identify that the keywords selected are bad in some cases,  just by looking at them if possible.

We don’t wish to simply build links – after all what you want is traffic, not simply links. Now, Keyword Research is the foundation for SEO. If you choose wrong keywords or bad keywords & then optimize your site then you wouldn’t get the benefits of SEO – how much ever effort you put in your other activities.

Let me explain why. Suppose you run a mobile phone site. You decide that “purchase iphone” is a keyword you want to target. However, if most of your target customers use the keyword “buy i-phone mobile” instead of “purchase iphone”, your SEO campaign may not be effective. Very few people are looking for the keyword you are targetting.

Now, second case: Suppose you target a keyword “buy iphone”, and thousands of target customers actually use this keyword. However, there might be stiff competition for this keyword. For example, you might be having sites like Apple, Ebay, Amazon etc. fighting with you on this keyword. It is virtually impossible for small businesses to overtake these sites, purely because of the authority they command. The wiser approach would be to target alternate keywords.

We have recently launched our Keyword Research service, so that we can help our customers who spend a lot of money on other link building activities. You can do Keyword Research by yourself, or take our help!

Directories ruled the web during the 1990s, when internet was just growing. The way people to used to access sites of their interest was quite different then. They either had to know the URL of the site, or browse the directories to find the sites of their interest. For example, if one wanted to read about Golden Retriever dogs, he or she would visit a web directory – then go to Pets category and then Dogs > Golden Retriever sub-category. Remember, Yahoo was originally a simple but popular directory of links. BOTW was another popular directory back then.

However over the years the number of sites on the web have grown exponentially and search engines have become quite powerful. Now, people search for websites simply by going to search engines and keying in the keywords. Though people aren’t directly using directories, biggies like Yahoo, Google, Botw are continuing to maintain their directories.

Now, just think on how the search engines would’ve been programmed initially to identify the category of sites? Definitely, they would have used the classification information from the directories. Though the search engines could’ve used keywords to identify the categories, the single important information that would decide the final classification would have been the classification in directories. Can you guess why? The reason is simple – the directories had the “human” element in them. The websites submitted had to be approved by a human editor. So, a human would definitely get the classfication right, definitely better than a script. I can write health related articles on my insurance site, so a script would classify my site as a “health site”, while a human being would classify it as an “insurance site”.

Now extend this to the current scenario. Search engines have become intelligent – yes. But they’re constantly being challenged by webmasters with spam, keyword-stuffing etc. to outsmart the search engines. Search Engines are in turn devising new algorithms to counter these, and deliver relevant results to the users. Tell me one reliable source of information that the search engines can take to judge a site? Yes, the directories can do that. Directories have the “human” element that helps the “machine” (search engines). If a site is listed in “Finance” category of a number of human edited directories – Do you think that it makes sense for the search engines to believe that the site is authentic? Well, yes!

We at Submit5.com are excited about new features in our SEO products.

1. For all directory submissions, we now create email accounts on a paid domain owned & hosted by us (not free email addresses like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo). Many directory owners tend to delete submissions from free email addresses & hence this would increase the approval rate, especially in quality directories. As usual, you don’t have to bother about using your email address, and handling the spam emails. We manage all that!

Plus – we don’t charge you anything extra for this! Submit5.com is the first & only service provider offering this feature.

2. You asked for it: From now all final reports of Directory Submissions will come with PageRank (PR) of the directories.

We hope to continue improving our services, in tune with the changing requirements of the search engines. Feel free to give us suggestions!

Welcome to the Submit5.com SEO Blog. Through this blog, we wish to stay in touch with our customers, as well as share the latest updates in search engine optimizations. We also plan to discuss best practices & updates from our end. Stay tuned!