Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [190]
The best business conversations are not in the boardroom. Most times, they aren’t even official. They usually take place in the hotel bars of conferences, impromptu (or barely formal) get-togethers, via IM or email, or in coordinating travel schedules. Casual, relaxed conversations can be the greatest source of information and content and of making valuable contacts.
Thursday: Find Link Opportunities
For any web marketer, gaining important links to your website is a critical stage, especially for a new website. Developing a solid base of links at first is the easiest part. Then, work into link development based on searching and researching. Next, your overall marketing plan should include methods of attracting new links. The final stage is a constant review of the links you have acquired and methods of looking for ways to improve them or grow additional links.
Develop a Base of Links via Directories and Associations
The first place to start in link building is to go for the “low-hanging fruit.” These are the easiest and quickest links that will serve the primary purpose of getting your site spidered by the search engines. For new sites, this is especially critical for getting found by the search engines. This is what we call the basic links or the “base” links that every new site needs.
In the modern day, search engines rule as the primary way to find information, but there was a time that online directories were the first resource for finding websites online. Prior to search engines, directories contained valuable lists and descriptions of websites, all classified in a particular niche.
As search engines come into existence, they needed to populate their database with as many websites as possible, especially high-quality websites, in order to have enough of a catalog of websites to provide relevant search results. The best places to find a large number of quality websites were these directories. The directories that were considered to be the most valuable were directories that were human-edited. This meant that there was a review process conducted by humans. A sort of quality review check was made on the site before it was allowed to be included in the directory. Because there was human judgment involved, search engines trusted the human-edited directories much more than automated directories where anyone could be included. Many directories are still in existence, and some—including Yahoo! Directory and Open Directory—still carry some weight.
General and Business-Specific Directories
Two of the first and foremost were the Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) and the Open Directory (dmoz.org). Yahoo! Directory started out as a free resource, but after being swamped with inclusion requests, Yahoo! went to a paid model. One can go to the “front of the line” and pay $299 USD for expedited service and a review within seven days. Once the site is accepted, then there is an annual $299 USD fee to remain in the directory.
The Open Directory is a completely volunteer-driven effort. Because all of the sites are reviewed and in order to handle all of the requests, volunteers handle a specific directory niche and review the sites that are suggested within their category. If there is no volunteer for a particular category, then it may take a while to get listed. It takes a long time to get listed in the Open