May 2013 M T W T F S S « Apr 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 -
Recent Posts
Tag Archives: website directory
Submit your URL — Just the Start of Website Success
Submit your URL here, submit it there, submit your URL everywhere — within reason. This is guerrilla marketing for the web, and it is surprisingly easy to do. Submitting your URL can be done without spamming; it just takes more effort to put a little class into your URL submissions. While search engines may (may!) not care about the quality of your link backs, webmasters and readers certainly do. And, increasingly, readers are also writers in the social media sphere. Do yourself, your website and your brands a favor and avoid inviting negative social media sentiment by using “classy” URL sharing techniques.
The easiest way I have found to share your URL to a high-profile website, is to start by finding websites with forums or groups that allow HTTP links to be included in posts. Create an account, join a few groups, and read. Then join or start a discussion by contributing thoughtful, unique, on-topic material in the body of your post. Then casually add a link referencing a related blog post or page from your website. Here’s an example of how I “submitted” a balhiser.com URL into a Wall Street Journal discussion of the economy. Notice how this topical post sparked meaningful, thoughtful discussion?
I recommend this approach for up-and-coming sites with fewer than 100 sites linking to them. You can find this link information from Google Webmaster tool’s “Links to your site” tab or Marketing Grader‘s “Here are X authoritative pages that are linking to you” section of its web marketing report. [I am pleased to see that for my websites, links from WebSQURL show up as "top" and "authoritative" respectively.]
That is how classy, “white hat”, guerrilla URL submission is done. But that is just the beginning of successfully marketing a website. Read more about 7 Website Visibility Basics.
Tagged keywords, sem, web directory, web squirrel, website directory
Squirrel away Web URLs
My mission for WebSqurl (Web Squirrel) is to revolutionize the web. Small (Squirrel) versus big (Google, Bing, Yahoo!). The story of the web is small wins against big. There are so many small, upstart websites and the “Squirrel” is one of them.
The irony is that WebSqurl needs Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other big sites to help make this possible. It’s about getting the word out… SEM, SEO and all that usual BS. It is precisely this silly SEM/SEO biz that WebSqurl could reinvent.
So, here I am blogging for dollars, blogging for an audience. Just like so many other bloggers and vloggers out there. Fighting the system, reinventing the system, using the system. Not via lawsuits and lobbyists, but with technology and passion and ideas. Please join me in this exciting web journey.
Tagged web directory, web squirrel, website directory
The Challenge of Blogging
SEO, SEM and social media folks repeatedly advise that websites have a blog and blog daily. I find that difficult, and try to blog weekly. But even blogging once a week can be challenging.
When my web traffic is increasing, I get energized and find it easy to blog. My traffic has been pretty flat for a couple weeks, so I’ve been lazy and haven’t blogged. A recent spike in traffic has me blogging away again.
It would be much better for my website if I would blog consistently, but there is a danger: blogging just for the sake of blogging — resulting in a bunch of poorly-written blog posts.
I created webSqURL because I saw an unfulfilled business need. I am hopeful that the site will hit the big time and take off exponentially. However, I know that start ups have perhaps on a 10% chance of succeeding financially. These are daunting odds. I’ve been involved with 8 start-up ventures at various phases of completion and only 2 have resulted in net profits. And only one that has exceeded $10,000 in net profit so far. And the profitable one is not internet-based.
Nonetheless my entrepreneurial spirit drives me on… looking to create that next great business. Hopefully webSqURL will be *that* business.
Tagged keywords, sem, seo, web, web squirrel, website directory
7 Website Visibility Basics
If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it does it make a sound? If your website is on the web but no one ever reads it, do you really have a website? A website without an audience is far less fun and useful than a website with a big audience.
Luckily, there are several free and easy steps that will help audiences find your website. I’ll walk through the details of each step:
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Google Analytics
- Forums, etc.
- Web Directories
- Analysis tools (like Website Grader)
- Insight for search keywords
Google Webmaster Tools
Setting up Webmaster Tools is as easy a following the instructions. You first verify that you own or control your website buy using a Google-supplied key. Once your website is verified, you will be able to submit a sitemap which will help Google find and explore your website content. You can also submit a robots.txt that will tell Google what not to “spider”.
After a couple weeks you’ll start getting some useful data about searchs and search keywords. Webmaster Tools will also identify problems that limit website SEO potential. The keyword data provides insight into how search is seeing and sharing your website with the world. Use that data to emphasize trends you like, and reduce effort creating content that isn’t getting traction.
Google Analytics
Setting up Google Analytics is similar to setting up Webmaster Tools. Once it’s had some time to collect data you’ll be able to see how much web traffic your site is getting and where it is coming from. There is a ton of data from Google Analytics, and rather than blog about it, I’ll let you discover it for yourself.
Create a twitter account that matches your website as closely as possible. For example @websqurl is the twitter account associated with this website. Then tweet a little bit. Don’t just spam your site, simply talk about it. And talk about related topics that you find interesting. Try and find like-minded people and follow them. Engage and have dialogs. You’ll promote your site (subtly) and build your social media presence.
Forums
Find forums, websites and discussion groups that relate to your site and post to them. For example on of my other websites, Balhiser.com, is about investing. I signed up on a couple free investing sites, fool.com and seekingAlpha.com and started posting. It wasn’t long before Google Analytics was showing traffic to my website from these forums.
Web Directories
Getting listed on a web directory can be a powerful way to 1) get direct traffic from the web directory, 2) establish links to your website which boost “organic” search traffic. Many web directories charge a fee or collect personal information (like phone numbers) to sell you on SEM/SEO services. But there are a few decent ones still out there, like DMOZ and WebSqurl.
Analysis tools (like Website Grader)
I recommend using Website Grader to get an overview of you website from an SEO perspective. It is free and easy to use. You can also use Klout to analyze your twitter web presence.
Insight for search keywords
As you become more familiar with keywords, you’ll want to explore more keywords. A great way to evaluate keywords before you even use them is to look them up on Google Insight. You might find that “website directory” has a bit more popularity that “web directory”… I just learned that! Time to start using the term “website directory” more often!
Tagged keywords, sem, seo, web analytics, web squirrel, website directory