Rogue Glass

A. Directory submission

I wouldn't bother with any directory submissions apart from the big ones Dmoz, Yahoo, BOTW etc. Directories now flood the web and often carry no weight. (If you can pick up 3000 back links from submitting info or paying somebody $25 to do automated submission is it really worth it?)

Also a lot of the directories break Google's Terms & Conditions, bad neighbourhood, non cached pages the list is endless.[/quote]

They can be part of bad neighbourhoods, but as long as you don't link back - it will have no real adverse effect on your rankings and therefore could only be the possibility of positive results.

B. Search engine submission

Don't bother, Google will spider your page from simply submitting your sitemap to Google webmasters tools. (submitting to 300 search engines packages are pointless.)

To have your site spidered by Google & Yahoo! very qucikly, join a forum and contribute with a link to your website in your singature or the footer of your reply post. Don't bother with the submission url, Google will only spider and index your website when they are ready. But if they find you via standard organic means, they will spider you straight away.

C. Link Building

Link building? Is very difficult these days and why spam is on the increase. If you buy a house worth £300k would you want to move it to a different estate with houses worth 90k? Doing that would decrease the value. Get links by posting good quality content people then link to you.

Also, don't carelessly buy incomming links - If the website you buy links from gets court for selling them, you will be penalised too.

D. social network

Watch out on this one. It's been mentioned that google might be checking this reducing the weight they carry. As a user of Digg I always get requests to Digg something for a friend. This is why low quality topics are hitting the first page.

It is true that if you have 3 links from the same website and all three pages have an equal PR of say 3, then each link carries less weight the more links on that website and they all calculate up to a link factor of 1. Therefore one link from the highest PR page on a website is equivalent to 200 links equally spread accross the website.

E. forums posting

A signature wouldn't go a miss but spamming is a no no. Make sure you actively contribute, not just post here and there.

F. blog comment posting

Due to all the spam it's become a funny thing. Instead of using your anchor text as your name take part, visit often and contribute to the post. You will have more chance of building a relationship with the author this might lead to a guest post or even a mention to your site.

However, High profile blog replies are rel="nofollow". This doesn't mean that links will carry absolutely no weight, but every other outgoing link from that page will recieve more link juice than yours. - Therefore only post replies if you are genuinely contributing otherwise you are wasting your time.

G. RSS submission

RSS submission is essential. Particulary if you have a news feed.

H. Article Submission

So many people neglect this aspect of SEO. Research shows that Google (not Yahoo!) gives more weight to inline anchor links than stand alone anchor links. This means that a link in this paragraph is better than the link below because it is more natural.

SEO Forum <- This link is not natural - it is explicitly designed as a link.

So as you can appreciate, an article is a much more natural form of linking and it's 'True Content' therefore Google treats it as such.

Just look at some Wikipedia pages for a prime example - and Google loves Wikipedia!

[I have been submitting articles using articlemarketer.com. They do not allow links in the article itself only in about the author. Are you suggesting that this is no good?? Is their better article submission services that allow html in the article linking back to my site?

Best
Kieran]