Having your site listed on Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is one of the best ways to gain high quality backlinks. Being listed on these top directories also influences your placement in other search engines and directories.

Yahoo! charges $299 annually for a listing in their directory. They do however guarantee that your site will be reviewed within 7 business days.

The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) can also take months and repeated submissions before you’re indexed. If your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from two weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites. Open Directory is definitely worth your effort.

On rare occasions, these directories will allow you to slip some keywords into the title, but do so at your own risk. This practice could raise a red flag for your submission and subject it to additional scrutiny.

The website description you include with your submission has a big impact upon how your site will rank once it’s listed in the directory. It is very important to get it right the first time. If you include too much promotional jargon in your description or make it too long, the human editors are sure to change it. If they do, it’s highly unlikely that your keywords won’t appear in the final listing. Be concise, be sensible, and, most of all, include your most important keywords wherever you can without appearing to be keyword loading.

Start with your meta description tag for your site. Copy and paste it into the submission form, then start deleting extraneous words. Reposition words until you have the shortest yet most descriptive sentence possible. If you do this correctly, chances are the editors won’t alter it. They’ll appreciate the fact that you saved them the time of editing the description.

The words you’re using in your description must appear on the pages of your site. If they don’t, and the site appears to be about subjects other than what you described in your form, your description might be edited. It’s almost impossible to change a site description once it’s listed in most Internet directories. Get it absolutely right the first time.

One shortcut to getting into DMOZ is to volunteer as an editor in the category you wish to appear. The time investment in most cases is well worth the return of having exactly the listing you want approved with just one submission.

Technorati Tags: zeal submission, dmoz submission, yahoo submission

Contextual advertising has become one of the most lucrative monetization vehicles available to bloggers and affiliate publishers. Our own blogs and sites have done particularly well with contextual ad links.

As publishers, here are the factors we consider when evaluating a contextual (text link) ad or affiliate program:

• Is it easy to sign up?
• Is the program available for any site or only a specific blog platform?
• Is it easy to install the code or plug-in?
• Can we combine ads with other ad brokers like AdSense?
• Does the company sell enough ads to actually place ads on your niche site?
• Is the limit before payments low enough to realize profits quickly?
• Do they pay reliably?

The publisher registration form at www.tnx.net/register.php was a snap to fill in… only five fields. I like that! TNX guarantees to review your site within 3 days.

The ads display on any page you place the code on. For blogs, just pop it in the footer. For HTML sites, just place the code on any page you wish ads to be sold on. The more pages, the more real estate you have to offer and the more ads you can sell. The price of each ad sold is based upon the page’s search engine rating. With TNX, you’re in charge of which pages the ads appear on.

TNX.net has no problem with you combining ad brokers. Even if some context ad brokers do have a problem with combining contextual ads from different systems, you can still ad TNX’s code because the ads appear as standard text links. Nobody can stop you from placing direct links in your pages.

TNX pays by a point system instead of PayPal/cheque. You can accumulate points and watch them grow, sell them back to TNX or another TNX member or buy links for advertising your own site.

There is a cost, by way of a 12.5% commission TNX charges to both advertiser and publisher.

If you have a PageRank above zero, you should give TNX.net a try. They have a handy income calculator on the site you can use to determine how well you could do with TNX.

Check out the forum post at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=477444 for more information.

We plan to try TNX on one of our other websites (www.whitewolfdesign.com) and will update this article from time to time. If you have used TNX we welcome your comments.

Technorati Tags: contextual advertising, kontera, tnx.net, text link ads

The Internet and search engines have reached a new level of maturity and sophistication. Search engines are putting more and more weight on the age of the domain in their algorithms.

If you purchase a domain that ranks reasonably well, but where the owner has failed to monetize the site or convert visitors into buyers, and the domain name matches the keywords you want to promote, you can shave many months off the standard ranking process. You should be able to buy an instant page rank cheaply because of the previous owner’s lack of marketing savvy.

According to the Google’s Sandbox theory, all new domains will take six to twelve months to rank well. If your business is solely Internet based buying a seasoned domain with a pagerank can literally mean the difference between a brilliant success and bankruptcy.

Whether or not you believe in the Google Sandbox theory, in most search engines, the age of the domain does play a role in site ranking. There are web pages in the index that have been there for a decade that have less than twenty back links, on extremely competitive terms, that rank in the top five positions.

An existing domain name that is already in the index is a valuable commodity. If you’re looking for a shortcut to search engine rankings, traffic and online profits, consider purchasing a mature domain.

A note of caution is in order. If you aren’t careful and purchase a domain that has been banned for either search engine black hat techniques or for click fraud then you can pretty much write off that domain for ever getting into the indexes again.

Cole Wiebe
Vancouver SEO

Technorati Tags: aged domains, seasoned domain, mature domains