It has been quite some time on this blog that we talked about effective blogging strategies, so I figured that you guys may need a small diversion from the regular set of articles that get published on this blog. In this article, Maria from wix.com explains how to effectively build your search engine ranking by adopting the Open Directory Project.

Boosting your online presence can make a big difference to your site traffic volume. This can increase sales and/or improve your standing amongst your competitors or contemporaries. So how can you get this boost? Well there numerous available methods to improve search rankings and traffic. A primary one is keyword optimization for search engines.

Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The starting point for anyone who is looking for a better ranking on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo is to make a website optimized in terms of keywords. In other words, that the words that people use to find sites like yours are listed high on the list when a search is made.

There are several ways to go about this, you can visit each search engine and manually enter your details. This is tedious, amateur and not recommended for those without considerable time to spare and it is not very cost effective either. Alternatively there is software available at a very reasonable cost such as All-in-One Submission, which for $70 will submit your details to thousands of sites; this is a fairly quick and uncomplicated method and works well. You can also pay someone to do all this for you; there are plenty of sites that will offer to do that and this approach works, but shop around because prices vary, and they are probably just using the same software you can buy at a fraction of the cost.

Get yourself listed on The Open Directory Project

Most search engines are supplied with information automatically by “spiders”. This is a type of software so-called because it traverses the web like a real-life spider, visiting every connection between the threads of its web. At each connection is a website and the search engines build up a map of every page out there in cyberspace. This clever software then reports back like a handy scout; there’s not just one scout either, there are billions of them. They all bring some details about the websites they visited back to the search engines. These then process this information and make a software-driven decision on whose site is the best for any particular search term. Humans only get involved pretty much by keeping the electricity on in the computer rooms at Google.

The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a non-profit making facility where human volunteers spend their whole time visiting websites and sifting through the spam and dross to find the sites that contain useful and real information, products and services; much like a human operated quality control service. They do not rank a Sales Letter very high at all, no matter how relevant the product to the keywords in the content. The ODP are looking for quality websites so products of dubious value and origin will not be listed. The tip here is to make sure you have a nice looking site with good content. Upgrade your tired old website and get a new look that is modern with up-to-date features. You can even get a free website update at sites like Wix and Weebly.

These can make you look so much more appealing to the human auditor from the ODP, and encourages them to give you a high quality rating, which will subsequently transfer through into a higher ranking on their list.

This may sound a bit like someone just re-wrote the yellow pages, and in a way they did; the big difference is that Google ranks these pages very highly indeed. Because there is human intervention, the sites they list on their directory (there are now tens of millions of listings) are worthy of a visit. Google knows this and gives you a high rank accordingly. These keywords are collected from the directory initially to find you and then from your site directly afterwards. Your site will be cached (copied) and stored at Google, which will identify your site map and spider more search terms that they might want to rank you with. Your site is now ranked well, and ranked accurately too.

So here’s the thing; if your site has the wrong keywords, even if the ODP lists you, it will not perform anywhere near in terms of traffic potential via the search engines, without the right keywords. So get your content written to include them. There are plenty of freelance writers who specialize in this type of writing at sites like oDesk and Elance. Shop around there too as there is a wide range of skills and prices available.

You may be wondering “why just worry about Google?” The other search engines both large and small spider Google too, so for a high rank in Google, a high rank can be expected elsewhere. Make no mistake about the power of proper keyword placement and SEO – it can increase your traffic and income tenfold.

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