SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

So whether you use paid or free directory listings shouldn’t depend on cost alone. What matters

when you’re selecting a directory in which to list your site is how relevant the directory is to your

site. After relevance, the next consideration is the quality of the sites that are listed in the directory.

If a directory you’ve selected is full of outdated sites, spam sites, or mis-categorized sites, it’s proba-

bly not the best choice of places to list your web site.

One more element to consider when choosing directories is the audience that’s most likely to use

the directory. The company should be able to provide a typical audience profile for you if you can’t

tell by looking at the types of sites listed in the directory. Going back to a principle you’ve heard

often in this book, your site should be created with the user in mind. The same is true for listing

your site. It will do you absolutely no good to list your site in a directory of law-based web sites if

your site is about home and family topics and products. Audience first. After that, everything will

fall into place.

Geo-Targeting SEO Strategies

Creating an SEO strategy for your web site requires more than just choosing what search engines

and directories it should appear in. Another consideration is where your site should be listed

The Skinny on Meta Search Engines

S

earch engines, search directories, and hybrids of the two are not the only search game on the

Internet. Another search tool that many people like to use are meta search engines. Meta search

engines are search engines that search other search engines.

One of the better known meta search engines on the Web is DogPile (http://www.dogpile.com).

If you conduct a search on DogPile, you’ll receive results for that search from more than half a dozen

different search engines. Nifty, right? But how do you apply that to your SEO efforts?

One of the criteria that meta search engines use when searching other search engines is the meta

data that’s included in your site. Keywords and many other aspects that you’ll optimize for are also

criteria that meta search engines use. So, if you’re optimizing for search engines, you should auto-

matically be optimizing for meta search engines.

Meta search engines also do not behave like regular search engines. These search engines do not

include a database of possible results; rather, a meta search engine pulls the results together from

other search engines — effectively aggregating them — and then returns only the top search results.

The concept is that collecting the top results from many different search engines will help users to

find the results they’re looking for much faster.

Don’t discount the impact that meta search engines can have on your site traffic. Although meta

search engines are not as popular as some search engines, many people use them, and they have the

potential to drive significant amounts of traffic to your web site.

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Part III Optimizing Search Strategies

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