Pedantic Impressions

High quality links are important to establishing your website in the eyes of the search engines. All the major search engines assume that sites which have lots of good links to them are more important and authoritative that their competitors. Adding your website to online directories is an important first step in establishing those links.
However, before you submit your website to the first directory, you’ll want to make sure everything is ready.

Make Sure Your Website Is Ready For Prime Time

If your website isn’t in the best shape, your submission efforts may fail as soon as you begin. You should make sure all your links are working, that you’ve done all your on site SEO work, and that you have tested it under several different web browsers.

I can not emphasize this step enough! Make sure you’ve finished all your web design and SEO work before you submit!
Write your title and link text.
This seems like a no brainer, but if you stop and take some time here it can really pay off. While most directories want you to use your business or site name, many will allow you to add a bit of extra info here. This is where you put your SEO hat on! For example, for my website, instead of using Pedantic Webspaces for the link text, I like to use Alabama Web Design.

Sometimes one directory will have different requirements for the title and link text. For example, one may allow 80 characters while another only offers 50. Even though you will end up writing several variations, the diversity will actually help you with the search engines. Why? Because when search engines see differences in links it looks more organic, which helps to boost your ranking.

Write a Brief Description of Your Website.

This is just like the one minute speech you learned to give about your company in business networking 101. A good brief description is essential to getting key information about your website’s important and unique offerings and should include a few keywords. You have a very limited space to do that, so you need to make every word count.

Most directories require a description from 150-300 characters. This is the description that will be on display just below the link to your website in the directory.

Avoid repeating the same word too many times and be very clear and professional. Don’t use hyperbole like “best” or “number one” – be factual. Don’t include information too specific like dates or prices as this needs to stand the test of time.

Some directories include a short description section that allows only 50-70 characters. Be concise! Imagine  you are stuck in an elevator with a potential client and you only have a few seconds to describe your website before they get off. What would you tell them?

Keywords, Tags, and Categories

Some directories want you to submit keywords or tags in addition to your description. Some include a predefined list of categories of which you can select a few to represent your website. Whether they want keywords, tags, or categories, be sure to list them in the order of importance for your website.

Remember, don’t repeat words too many times! Try to use words that actually appear on your website, or keywords that people would type into a search engine to find you.

Write For Humans, Not Machines!

Remember that while it is important for the search engines to pick up on this listing, your success ultimately lies with having users actually click from the link to your website.

Make a List and Check It Twice!

After you have finished preparing all that material, look over it a second time. Maybe even a third. I can’t tell you how many spelling errors I caught on a second or third pass. If you can, have a coworker or friend look over the information as well. They can sometimes catch mistakes that you look right over.

Submit to Quality Directories.

There are thousands of different directory services out there, and frankly some of them aren’t worth the time and trouble. Try to submit only to quality directories. Avoid Free For All link sites, link farms, or any that look too spammy.

Ever seen a service that will submit your website to thousands of search engines and directories for a small fee? Yeah, don’t bother. They are a waste of time and money and are pretty ineffective.

It’s best to pick high quality sites which are likely to list your website, and submit your site to them by hand.

Does the Color of My Headpiece Really Matter?

Anyone who does any research online about search engine optimization will eventually run into a plethora of concerns about the color of one’s hat. Some techniques are white hat, some are black hat. ( Why no green hats? ) It can get a little confusing for someone who isn’t in the industry. What exactly makes something white or black and why does it matter?

Specifically Vague

The first thing we need to do is consider what SEO is really about. When you perform SEO work you are trying to make search engines stand up and take notice of your website. The more Google or Bing likes your website, the higher in the rankings you’ll appear.

Great, so far so good. So what makes a search engine like your website? THAT is a tricky question because search engines don’t like to get specific. Google recently admitted that they change how they rank websites over 1000 times a year! I’m sure Bing and Yahoo are equally industrious. Detailing every single one of those changes would be difficult. Plus, it could lead to people finding loopholes and gaming the system.

Despite the lack of specifics, over the years Google and the other search engines have talked about their vision of what a good website is all about. Some of the highlights include writing good quality original content, good spelling and grammar, don’t link to spammy websites, and a host of other commandments.

Differing Philosophies

The problem for the search engines is that it isn’t always possible to catch people breaking their guidelines. It takes a lot of computing power to read every website, follow how they link to each other, and infer intent. This is where we can now draw a distinction between the hats.

A White Hat SEO will try to work within the intentions of the search engines. They follow Google’s best practices as closely as they can and try to be a “good neighbor” according to the search engines. Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, doesn’t mind breaking with Google’s intentions as long as they can get away with it. This can offer them significant gains over a White Hatter, as long as they don’t get caught.

Let’s make a crazy example. What if Google hated the letter Z? For whatever reason ( maybe to get back at an old schoolyard bully named Zack ) they didn’t like ‘Z’ anymore and wanted to limit it’s use on the internet.

In our example, the White Hat SEO would try to avoid using the letter Z wherever possible. One or two might be necessary ( say, on a Zoo’s website ) but they avoid it if at all possible. The Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, would push the limit. They might discover that Google allows you to have up to 50 Z’s on a website but no more. So the Black Hat’s website would have 40 or 45 Z’s, even though they know Google doesn’t like Z, just to gain a competitive advantage. ( Apparently searching for the letter Z is a popular pastime. )

Why You Should Care

No harm, no foul, right? In a competitive business world, if Google lets you have 50 Z’s then what’s the harm in pushing the limit? Remember those thousands of updates search engines make to their algorithms every year? Well, you know Google doesn’t like the letter ‘Z’. Maybe next year they decide they were being too generous and cut the limit down to 20. Oh oh. Now your website has too many Z’s. Google sees your website as a problem. Your ranking on the search engines could drop, or worse: You could be completely delisted.

While the notion that a search engine would ban a particular letter is absurd, the key lesson of that example is real: If you care about how you’re ranked on the search engines, you should play by their rules. Hence it is important that your SEO firm is playing by the rules too.

In our next article we’ll look at some questions you should ask your SEO company to make sure they are playing by the rules.

“Art is fundamentally a survival device of the species. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so persistent. It wouldn’t be in every culture. We wouldn’t know about it…

“How does art help you survive? It helps us survive by making us attentive. In a simplistic way, when you go past a forest and you look at it and you say, ‘that looks just like Cézanne.’ And you realize Cézanne has made you see the reality of the forest in a way that you never could have seen before. He’s made you attentive. Every work of art that you care about makes us attentive. And if it doesn’t do that—it ain’t art.” – Milton Glaser

Taken from the article: Glaser on art and Obama

For anyone who has been watching, you know this is an important point in the history of Pedantic Webspaces. Even though we’ve been creating online marketing for over two years, we’ve officially been a full time shop for just over two weeks.

It hasn’t quite sunk in all the way, but I blame that on an abundance of work to get us started on the right foot. A number of our existing customers decided to update their websites in the last few weeks, and we can’t thank them enough for their continued support.

If there is one thing that a potential customer needs to understand before diving into a new web project, it is that it’s never truly finished. Like the Dunkin Donuts man who gets up at 4am every morning, people serious about getting noticed need to stay on top of their online presence. Making a static page that never changed may have worked in the ’90s, but nowadays your visitors expect something more for their time and trouble. They’re looking for timely information; They’re looking to be entertained; They’re looking for something that will stand out from all the background noise. It’s a tall order, but one that is achievable if you put in the effort.