We’re compiling a list of SEO Friendly CSS galleries for designers who are interested in getting a little link love while showcasing their work. To be considered, the galleries must either have a direct, do-follow link from the actual gallery or a direct do-follow link from a sub-page featuring the work.
We’ll update this page regularly, and hopefully provide an Excel download once the list grows a little bit – so feel free to comment with anybody we missed.
Submitting your guide service or outfitter to directory websites is a good idea for two reasons:
First, because many of these sites come up in major search engines for a variety of phrases, which can lead potential clients to your website. Second, it can help build your search engine rankings by giving you high quality, relevant inbound links to your charter or guide website. Most are free, and some require you to link back to their site from yours (reciprocal linking), but all offer web links as well as contact info pointed towards your business.
Fishing Directories |
Hunting Directories |
Another simple way to increase to increase your website or blog’s inbound links is by commenting on blogs related to your industry. It takes just a few minutes to gain high quality, one-way, relevant inbound links – and you might just learn something you can use while you do it! It’s important to stick to blogs about your particular industry, since Google and other search engines give higher priority for links coming from pages with similar topics.
Nobody likes the guy who posts “I’m the best Fishing Guide in FL, check me out.” Blatant advertisement is likely to be deleted quickly, and very few people will follow the link to your site this way. Rule of thumb is to either add something complimentary, or something thoughtful is even better – it doesn’t have to be esoteric however.
On most blogging platforms, there will be three boxes that you’ll need to fill out. Here’s a couple tricks to get the most out of the comment you’re about to enter:
I’ve been involved at Outdoorzy.com for nearly a year now, and I would suggest that any serious outdoors related business join for a business account, even if you’re not into the whole social networking thing.
It’s a social network, like MySpace or Facebook, for outdoors types. Forums, to-do lists, trip reports, etc. But it also has a Business Directory!
You get photos or screenshots, an explanation of your business, and more, for the enormous price of $0.00 – all in front of your target audience on a growing social network. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, you’re allowed to place one-way, inbound links from your profile to your website which helps to increase your site’s standings in the search engines.
The second pillar of DIY SEO is generating inbound links, or links that point from other websites toward yours. Link baiting is an effective strategy for generating one way, high quality inbound links for your website or blog, and especially so for genres of popular interest such as fishing, sports, or news.
Wikipedia defines Link bait as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”
Link baiting is all about creatin the buzz, and can take many forms, but in all cases involves content that is working talking about, and therefore worth referencing via hyperlink. There are four general types of link bait, but they can contain elements of any or all.
Before getting into the intricacies of how to rank well in the search engines, we need to first discuss what we want to target. First a quick example, our family’s commercial real estate website. We started by targeting terms like “commercial real estate” and “commercial property” along with our trade areas of “Roswell,” “Alpharetta,” and “North Fulton”. We quickly ranked #1 in Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the terms “North Fulton Commercial” and others similar. Great, right? Nope, because nobody was typing the search term “North Fulton commercial property” into the search boxes!
But how? Below you’ll find some tools to check search volume for a list of keywords, that way you won’t go into you’re DIY SEO campaign blindly.
Start by making a list of possible keywords for your business, and don’t forget – if your business has anything to do with a geographic area, make sure to include the place names.
For example, if I were running a guide outfit for bonefish in the Florida keys, my list might look like this:
Great, now we have our keyword list, here’s what to do with it.
Log onto the Google Adwords Tool, and enter in one of your keyword phrases.
Feel free to experiment with the columns list, showing search trends, cost per click, but it all comes down to the “Search Volume” and “Advertiser Competition” columns. Anything with no data under the search volume column, put a big red line through it.
Pay special attention to terms or phrases that have a relatively high search volume, and low advertiser competition. These are the terms you can rank well with easily, and have high search volume for traffic generation.
Notice the difference between the term highlighted in red and the ones in green.
*Please note, I’m not saying you should disregard highly competitive keywords, we’ll focus on them once we have the DIY SEO techniques down. Do disregard keywords that have little or no search data, you’ll be wasting time that could go into better keywords.
One of the three pillars of SEO strategy is of content, specifically relevant text that is search engine readable. We’re going to take a look at what is search engine friendly content, what is not, and how to find out what your site or blog looks like to search engines.
Search engines index your web page and everybody else’s by scanning the HTML code contained within it. They scan looking to determine the content and context of the page, and also consider relevant HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, em, strong, etc.).
Search engines do not, however, load images, CSS styles, and animation (including Flash). Text that is written in images, including navigation menus, are invible without using the “alt” tag, which by the way is a poor substitute. This means anything written in these images or animations will not be indexed, and won’t influence your search engine rankings accordingly.
Here’s an example of a full Flash site, loaded in a frame set. Notice how there are no written words to give search engines a clue as to what this page is about?
On the other hand, the following page offers lots of written text, links, and HTML tags:
To view what content the search engines can index, simply enter your web address in the following page address in the tool below.
http://www.willmaster.com/library/tools/What_Search_Engine_Spiders_See.php?dlperry
