A directory owner’s job is never done, and very rarely is it a simple task. After taking a well deserved break from things during the Christmas holidays, I came back to see a backlog of 1,700 site submissions.  In order to better utilize my time, I decided to cleanse the queue of the rubbish first. I would start out by looking at the sites that had not followed the submission guidelines. Simply put, I found a few hundred sites that no longer required my attention. 

For site owners who wish to make the quick removal list, I offer these seven simple steps.

1. Don’t worry about what category you wish to be listed in.
What is the point of creating a relevant, categorized resource? The answer is simple….there is no point to it. If I want to locate sites about SEO, I should be looking in the Beauty category, and if I’m interested in Fashion, I should obviously look under Finance.  Otherwise, it would be silly.

2. Must be English really means must be incoherent to everyone irregardless of their geographic location.
In order to be most useful to a global audience, all site descriptions and content should be written in Spanglish (an English-Spanish hybrid) by a four year old girl who only speaks Russian.  Or better yet, just bang on random keys.  According to the old saying, a million monkeys would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. so one person should be able to do a much better job than several generations of simian primates.

3. My preteen nephew needs more access to porn
Family friendly means that we wish to list sites that everyone can enjoy.  While my youngest nephew may not know what “hot lesbian action” or “BSDM” is, he should be able to grab his mother’s credit card and get access to it as soon as possible.

4. We need more drugs
After watching Michael Moore’s Sicko, I have a much better appreciation for the problems with the U.S. Health Care system. I feel that the ability for Americans to purchase generic drugs from countries which include anti-freeze in their toothpaste  or lead-based paint in their toys will help provide a possible solution to this problem.

5. Illegal is just a fancy buzzword meaning Fun
Does your site offer a product or service that may require me to pay a substantial fine, face imprisonment or the death penalty?  I may be wrong, but I was quite certain hallucagens, prostitution and gambling are subjects that are universally accepted in all parts of the world.

6.  Who needs content when you have ads?
Content is really a dead art-form.  What I really want to see is a page filled with paid ads, with a couple of words thrown in.  And if I’m unable to differentiate between the ads and real content, even better.

And finally…..

7.  Why create content when you can just copy it?
This happens to be one of my favorite topics.  Partly because it works on so many levels.  You could register multiple domains and have them all point to the same site, and claim each one is a completely different site.  You can create multiple sites that have all of the same content, but different headers.  You can post a story on your blog about a cool Canon camera that you have never really used, on the same day hundreds of others do the same.  Or better yet, you can copy this post and claim it to be your own.  As it is, all I really want to see is the same things over and over again, just like everyone else on the planet.

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In conclusion, if you follow the guidelines, use some common sense, and create original content : you could be the next Directory Idol.  Otherwise, you are just a Delete away.

Disclaimer: The following rant was a by-product of what appeared to be some underhanded and unethical SEO techniques. Any references to these sites should not be considered endorsements but simply as reference to the dishonest techniques referred to. To ensure that these individuals do not receive additional benefits from this exposure, I’m incorporating the rel=”nofollow” tag in their links (consider this a non-vote by Google standards). Using the techniques discussed below may cause you to be blacklisted by the major search engines and should not be attempted.

To my surprise the other day, I received a large number of submissions for the Directory in the Business Blogs and Internet Blogs categories. The blogs submitted came in the form of general-topic blogs, with topics ranging from cars and travel to electronics. The first couple blogs I came across were filled with broken and nonsensical English, and a headline like How to make best of your Rome tour would follow with what seemed like nonsense. I came across similar stories in Remoov, Whiteman Library, Life With Pedro, Coach Ganville, Michael’s Daily Blog, Noobity Weblog, and numerous more. After taking a closer look at each posting, one would notice that certain keywords were included in the various posts:

• Papal Audience
• Rome Shore Excursion
• Rome Travel
• Tour of Rome
• Vatican City
• Vatican Tour

Why would a number of completely different bloggers be posting about something completely the same? Same website being linked to, same general topic, and all posted on the same day?

Fast forward a little bit and we come across other similarities. All of these bloggers have comments turned off, and (with the exception of one or two) all of them have the default WordPress About Page which reads:

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress

Who were these supposed “genuine” bloggers? Some of these blogs had text on their blogs stating they were “reliable and authentic reviews“, “experts comments” and “real and factual reviews“, but no explanation given to the inspiration of their postings. I can’t speak for everyone, but I found these statements strange and questionable. But still no real evidence as to why supposed authentic experts were all posting blogs about traveling to Rome, Canon digital cameras, car donations, cannabis seeds, as well as model ships and boats.

Then I started noticing a few blogs were including a link to a website called BlogNList, a site that sold blog reviews. For a nominal fee, a website would be reviewed on a set number of blogs with the users choice of keywords and URL. As mentioned in a recent post , the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank is a violation of their terms of service. And this was not merely a single paid link, but potentially hundreds of links.

So, is it ethical for Blogger X, to make claim to genuine reviews when the person being referred to is paying them, or at the very least cooperating with a company who is profiting from these links?

On a closing note, should anyone representing these authentic reviewer want to voice their opinion, feel free to leave a comment.

A great number of web directories utilize thumbnails for the sites listed, in order to enhance the look of their listings.  If you have been visiting any of these directories recently, you may have seen broken images, as the service that had been used by MSN appears to be offline.  Whether this is temporary or permanent,  an alternative is necessary.

To maintain the look of our directory, we have adapted our site to utilize the thumbnail service from picoshot.com.   If you are a directory owner, or know someone who runs a directory that has been affected, you might wanna recommend this service.

After taking a look recently at the Google Blog Search Tool, I came across a frightening trend…auto-blogging plagiarism.  For those not familiar with the process, programs exists that will search out existing blogs for certain types of content (sports, finance, etc.) and when it locates it, grabs a paragraph or two and adds it to its own blog, with no reference to the original source.  Less sophisticated but also effective, are blog-scrapers which seeks out posts and allow the user to modify the content as needed. For examples of this, we do a search on the keywords  need-content-blog. You will see three or four posts that come up with the results, the original post posted here at the Free SEO Friendly Blog, as well as three additional links.  The one posting is merely two different sentences ripped directly from the posting. Another one references the stolen blurbs and references the first act of plagiarism as the source.  The other displays a broken quote and links directly to the original source.  Looking in my comments section for this post, I see a reference to a posting that was merely a copy of my content (although the site now appears to be down).

 The other crummy part about this, is that the plagiarized posting gets a higher rank in Google’s results as it had been linked by another site.

Looking for answers, I came across websites offering the auto-blogging software as a method of providing “original content” for your site, as it would grab postings in other languages and translate it using online translation tools. Well, if this is the software they used, it obviously didn’t do its job very well.

Now don’t get me wrong, as a blogger, you do want people to link to your articles, syndicate your feeds via rss, and read what you have to say, but taking your content and not giving you credit is downright criminal. 

How do we combat against these content-thieves?  No one solution is guaranteed.  Wordpress (the software we use) offers different plug-ins which will allow everything from banning certain users access to the blog, to limiting what they see.

Will provide more information as we come across it.

One of the many factors the major search engines consider when determining how important a website is (in regards to how high a site will appear in the SERPs) is link popularity.  Essentially, every site that links to your site is considered a vote for your site. But when you start a new site, noone knows about it.  How are you supposed to develop link popularity?  Enter….web directories.

Web directories are basically searchable databases that sort links by category. Simply submit your site to a directory, and if approved (that’s another story), a link to your site will be added. So, how does that help you with the search engines? Search engines also search and index these directories. And, a directory listing is a one way link to your site with your site’s description as content.  The more directories that include your link, the more link popularity that your site has.

So, now you have a website, and you need to develop link popularity through directories.  What directories do you submit to?  Well, you need to find directories that are search-engine-freindly, meaning that their link to you site is direct (like to http://freeseofriendlydirectory.info), and not a redirect (Which looks kinda like: http://www.searchdirectorysite/redirect.php?id=4556324).

Next question: where do you find these search engine friendly directories?  Well, you can start with our own directory at:    http://www.freeseofriendlydirectory.info/ .

There are also directories that list web directories:
some of these include:
http://www.directoryrate.com
http://www.webdirectory-index.net/
http://www.web-directories.ws
http://www.directorycritic.com/

Now these directory sites list all types of directories, so you’ll want to look carefully before requesting to have your site added to them.  Some directories will require a fee, while others are entirely free.  Some cover all sorts of topics, while others will be more specialized.  And some of the directories listed will not be search-engine friendly.

One of the best resources we’ve come across for search-engine friendly directories is at http://info.vilesilencer.com/.  They currently host a list of over 500 search-engine friendly directories (which can even be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet).  The list is maintained and updated regularly to ensure that only search-engine friendly directories are mentioned.

So, start submitting your site to directories and see your link popularity grow. 

After recently stumbling upon the Live Search Webmaster Central Blog, I noticed a post mentioning about the new Live Search Webmaster Centre.  Having already used Google’s Webmaster Tools, I was curious to see how the Microsoft giant’s offering was going to compare.

Very much like the Google product, an account was required to take advantage of the additional tools.  Fortunately for me, my old Hotmail account (or as it is referred to now, my Windows Live ID) was still active, saving me the extra trouble of signing up for yet another account. 

Upon signing in, I was prompted to add a new site.  Besides being asked for my site’s URL, and e-mail address, I was also asked for an optional sitemap address (it looks as if Google & Yahoo! are not the only ones accepting this method now).  Like Google, I was given options to prove the site in question was mine, and was given 2 validation methods.  I could add a meta tag to the website’s main page, or add an XML file to the root directory.  Surprisingly, upon uploading the XML file, I was granted instant access into the tools.

The Tools

At first glance, it appeared as if the Live tools were a direct ripoff.  Over the last few years we’ve all heard about PageRank and how important it is for site optimization.  But little explanation was given to the five little green bars I saw next to the Domain rank.

The big question was: “Is this good? Have I achieved a status in SEO heaven for my site? (well, at least for one of the bigger engines)”  The answer:

I don’t know.  Upon inspecting the FAQ and Webmaster Help sections, nothing explained the relevance of the five bars.  These mysterious bars became even more a curiosity when I looked below the Top 5 pages heading.

Apparently five of the 857 pages indexed were worth noting.  However, they also appeared to give mixed messages, with two pages rated 5 bars, two rated 3 bars and one rated 1 bar.  Referencing my logs in AWStats, revealed that I had seen traffic to all 5 pages via search engines, so I still wasn’t able to determine the significance.

The keyword option added more fuel to the confusion fire, as I entered keywords to see how they ranked, only to have the site’s homepage appear with those five silly bars again (I would’ve at least appreciated an actual significant number). When typing the same keywords into the Live Search, those keywords produced a link of the 5th page of search results (42nd overall).  This did nothing to help me in understanding.

Further down the line, I was offered to see my top incoming and outgoing links, as well yet another opportunity to add a sitemap.

The Verdict:
 While this product is still very much in Beta, the support end of it remains mind-numbing.  A further inspecting into the adjoining forums, gave me some hope that a five-bar site was excellent (as was assumed by a forum poster), the relevance still isn’t there.  I hope future updates to their Webmaster Centre can shed some light on these matters.

A lot of discussion has come recently about Google’s policy on paid linking (payings someone to add your link to their site, as well as charging money for links) in an effort to improve one’s PageRank.  This seems to have been the cause of a lot of concerns from a number of directories, as well as some larger sites.

I came across a posting at Directory Trials that sheds some light on the topic, specifically referencing the response in the Google Webmaster Help Centre.

The posting states:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

For this very reason, the Free SEO Friendly Directory has done away with its paid Featured Listing option.  As it was, we never received payment for any Featured Listings.  Instead, it has been an editorial decision when to add a Featured Listing and will continue to be so.

In a previous post, SEO for Newbies, we discussed the need for good content.  So the question arises: what is good content?  Before answering that, let us take a look at the problem that generated that very question.

Many new webmasters make the mistake of building a few pages (an about us page, a products or services page, and a contact page) and assuming that this should be enough to generate interest in their product or service.  And while these items are pretty much mandatory things to have on any business website, they remain pretty static.  Some industries can see very little change in regard to the line of products or services they offer.  Your existing customers are unlikey to return to your site to see the same widgets over and over again. And if your competitors sites show the same widgets, how can you catch the eye of a new prospective customer?  With fresh content.  And for those of you who are still asking how we get fresh content, I may suggest taking a second look at the title of this post.  You blog.

A blog (as a noun, and is short for web log) is a website where the entries are written in chronological order and are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent entry displayed first).  Blogging (as a verb) is the act of adding and managing the ‘content‘ within a blog. Blogs can be journals, where the author reports on the events of their day.  Blogs can be editorial in nature, where the authors provides commentary on recent events, which can range from global affairs to local sporting events.  Many blogs can be seen and heard, meaning they can include pictures, audio, and or video.  And blogs are interactive, meaning readers can leave comments and create further discussion on a topic.

So where do you begin?  Well first, if you already have a webhost, you could install weblog software.  Wordpress is a favorite of many, and is also the software we use.  There are also blog hosting sites that provide you with all the tools you need.  You can signup for a free account through sites like Blogger, Wordpress.com or BlogEasy.  Once you have the software end figured out, the next problem is: what do you write about?

As we are discussing websites for business, the blog should in some way tie in with your business.  If we look at existing examples, we might be able to gauge what might work for your business.  Software developers write about the next version of the sofware they are working on, often with screenshots and suggestions from readers.   Office supply stores provide tips on properly disposing of ink cartridges and creating eye-catching stationary. Other businesses post pictures of their staff interacting at company outings, or installing equipment at a job site.

If you are still unsure of what you could write about,  you may want to look at what other bloggers are writing about, even if the blog isn’t for a business.  Health professionals may want to look at Sister Skinny which chronicles the story of two sisters looking to lose weight.  Financial consulatants could take a tip or two from the single income couple who write for Not Made Of Money.  And entrepreneurs of all types could learn a little something by reading a story or two from Self Made Minds. 

If you are still uninspired, browse through our Blogs Directory, and maybe you may read something that inspires you to write something informative or inspirational as well.  

For those of us who have been involved in web development for a number of years,  the  landscape of Search Engine Optimization has changed a great deal.  Some of us recall simpler times, when you could simply build a page, throw some keywords into a meta tag, submit it to a few engines and then find that same page in the top of a Search Engines Results Page (or SERPS) without any great effort. There was no PageRank, no Live Search, and if you didn’t list well in one  search engine, there were dozens of other popular engines to work with.

 Like all great things, this came to an end.  People would stuff their meta tags with tons of irrelevant words, and  suddenly while trying to do a search for  ’snowmen’, you would come across an adult site or some other site that had nothing to do with the keywords you typed in.  The search engines needed to change how they valued pages in order to avoid irrelevant results from appearing, and the graytrain came to an end. 

  Coming back to present times, the majority of online searches are coming from one of the Big 3 (Yahoo!, MSN, Google) engines, and the idea of being found amongt billions of other sites can be a bit intimidating for a newcomer (and still to some of us more seasoned users).  However, there are a few basic tips that can help you in your ability to be found. 

Choose appropriate keywords

While the rules for keywords have changed, it is still important to pick out a few select keywords that are relevant to your site.  The old art of stuffing your meta tags with hundreds of irrelevant words will get you nowhere. It is more important to focus on 10 or fewer keywords, as this will allow you a better chance at seeing positive results.

Make sure your keywords match your content

While some people may choose to use a physical location as a keyword in order to generate more localized results, simply choosing the keyword ‘Toronto’ means nothing if Toronto appears nowhere else within the body of your pages. In fact, most good keywords should appear more than once and within different parts of you site. 

Your title, keywords, description and content should match

While this may sound like a lot of work, this task it is much easier to achieve than first appears.  When someone does a search on Google (for instance), the SERP will display three specific things for each site listed:  the site’s URL, a title, and a brief description. The title is taken from what appears between the <title></title> tags, and the description will either come from the page’s contents or from what appears in the meta description tag. High relevancy among all four items, may not always guarantee a top listing, but it doesn’t hurt your cause. So if your company is called Chicken Burger Hut, you could use Chicken Burger Hut in the title, the meta description and within the body of the page, and then use chicken and burger as keywords. Using this method, the keywords ‘chicken burger‘ will be considered more relevant to your website.

Be creative with your descriptions.

What good would it be to appear on the top of the Search Engine Results Pages, if noone clicked onto your site?  To avoid this, make sure to be descriptive, and when possible, try to utilize eye-catching terminology. If you are unsure of what might work for you, look at the results for other sites and see which ones catch your attention. 

Build good content.

While often overlooked, you should consider this the most important task of all.  Content, at least in the Internet world, is king.  Whether you are looking for information regarding a product or service, doing research on a particular topic, participating in a discussion, reading a funny story, or watching a video clip, you are looking at content.  The more helpful, informative, amusing or comical (depending on the type of content), the better likelihood is that people will see it.  If you place this is as your top priority, the rest will come together much more easily.  

The freeseofriendlydirectory.info site is almost ready for launch.

This blog will be utilized to provide regular tidbits about SEO as well as this directory. 

Please come back soon for more information.