Most pages that get submitted to search engines are of low-quality. There is no
guarantee that your site will get included for free just by submitting it. The best
way to get listed in search engines is to get other people to link to your site.
Yahoo! is currently the only major search engine to offer a paid inclusion program.
Yahoo! Search Submit Basic lists sites in all of the Yahoo search properties. You
don’t need to use paid inclusion to get listed in search engines. Most useful and
original websites will get included in the search indexes for free if they build
a few links.

Search Engines versus Directories

Search engines are operated by scripts and machine code. Some of them have
human editors, but, by and large, search engines are run by automated relevancy
algorithms.
Directories are human-compiled lists of sites organized by categories. Since
directories are entirely human-edited, they take time and effort to maintain.
Whenever I create a new site and I am happy with it, I submit it to a about a half
dozen or a dozen directories. A few of the larger directories are listed in the next
section. In addition, you can find a relationship chart that clearly shows how the
largest search engines and directories interact here:

http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

When submitting to directories, it is worth it to spend the extra time to ensure you
are in the correct category and are following the directory guidelines. For example,
the DMOZ guidelines can be found here: http://dmoz.org/add.html.

Submitting Your Site
Submitting to Search Engines

The best way to get your site indexed is through having a search engine follow
a link from another site. This section will focus on how to maximize the speed
and efficiency of this process. I will address paid inclusion (mentioned above) in
more depth toward the end of this book.
Social Interaction and Links

Where to Get Links
• Create content or ideas that important people can identify with and
would likely link to.
• Directories may link to sites you submit.
• You can exchange links with similar websites. If you can afford to, it is
better to create legitimate business partnerships and friendships rather
than just to trade links with whoever is willing.
• Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other websites
can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit
articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for
the article submission sites, or have a longer or different version of the
article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate
content issues when others syndicate your articles.
• Writing press releases can give you inbound links.
• You can participate in forums that provide signature links. If you
participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments, then
eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.
• Buy links or rent advertising space.
• Donate to charities for links.
• People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you
asking. Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in
competitive markets.
Generally, the easier and cheaper the link is to get, the less a search engine will want
to trust it. Getting other people to want to talk about you or your business (and
link to you) is the golden egg of SEO.
Search engines want to count legitimate editorial citations. They would prefer not
to count other types of links as votes. Some engines, such as Google, have
advanced algorithms to find and discount many artificial links.

How often do Search Engines Crawl?
Search engines constantly crawl the web. Pages that frequently update with strong
link popularity may get crawled many times each day. Pages that do not change
that often, are associated with spammy sections of the web, and/or have little link
popularity may get crawled only once or twice a month.

Sites like CNN are crawled hundreds or thousands of times each day. Since search
engines are constantly adding content to their index, they are in a constant state of
flux.

How Search Engines Evaluate Links
Through the “eyes” of a search engine, you usually cannot control who links to
you, but you can control to whom you link.. In most cases, if bad sites link to you,
it does not hurt you. If you link back, it does. So in essence, it usually does not
hurt you to get inbound links. You should be rather selective with whom you
are willing to link out.
Start With Trust
Some search algorithms may look at the good link to bad link ratio as well. If your
site has few well-trusted links and many low-quality ones, they may filter out your
site if they suspect it of overt ranking manipulation.
When you get quality links, you are not only getting the boost those links may give
you, but you are also lowering your risk profile and naturalizing your link profile.
Some links are a sure sign of quality. For example, if you are listed in the Yahoo!
Directory, search engines know that at some point in time an editor working at a
search company reviewed your website.
If you are trying to replicate the success of a competing site, it is important to start
by trying to get a number of higher quality links before getting too many lowquality
links.
If you are unsure if something is a quality link or not, ask yourself if you were a
search engineer would you want to trust that link. If the answer is “yes,” then it is a
quality link. It is still okay to get some low-quality links, as automated scraper sites
and other junk sites give practically all well-ranked sites a bunch of low-quality
links, but the key to doing well in the long term is to try to create a reason why
people would want to give you quality links

Blogs and Weblog Comment Spam
I recommend viewing the web as a social medium. Find blogs with posts about
topics you are interested in and participate in the community. The whole point of
weblogs is community discussion, so it is not spam to add something useful and
link to your website from it.
Don’t expect the link to help you rank better in the search engines, but if you
participate in your community and leave useful comments, it will make some
people more likely to link to your site or pay attention to you.
An even better way to get noticed with blogs is to comment about what other
blogs say on your own blog.

On some occasions I have seen mainstream media outlets quote blogs or contact
people who left comments on blogs. If you are actively engaged in the
conversation, you will gain authority much quicker than if you are not.

Chat, Google Groups & Forums

In forums, people asking and answering questions creates free content for the
person who owns the site. This automated content creation allows the forum
owner to sell advertising space against the work of others.
In exchange for the posts, many SEO forums allow signature links that point to
your website. Since forums change rapidly, they often get indexed frequently. Your
site will get indexed quickly if you ask a few questions at a few of the various SEO
forums.

Of course, the goal of forums is to have meaningful conversations, but if you are
reading this e-book, odds are that you may still have some SEO questions.
Forum links are easy to get and forums have many links on the pages though, so
the links probably do not have a large effect on SEO. Forum sig links from
relevant. useful posts have far more direct value in driving sales and building
friendships than in effecting search results directly.
I have found that some search engines such as Yahoo! look at word patterns on
web pages to find what words relate to others. I have the username “seobook” on
many forums. On many forums, there is a button to private message users next to
their username.

By helping others by participating in web communities, you become more
linkworthy and work your name and your brand into the language representative of
your topic. Plus, if you know what people in your community are talking about, it
is much easier to create things they would be interested in and market them to their
needs and wants.

Sometimes it is worth it to spend a little money to help build your site up. Many
people can find college students or people from Craigslist and pay them about $10-
$12 an hour to create content for their sites.
Find a copywriter for hire at a site such as Elance or have a more expensive
copywriter ghost write an article for you. Make sure you get the exclusive rights to
the article if you do not want them to use it on other sites or newsletters later.
Some sites like Constant Content make it quick, cheap, and easy to buy articles,
tutorials, and reviews.
You can buy content from various sites that specifically create content for sale by
finding out who creates news in your industry or by searching for syndicated
content providers from a search engine or directory.

Automated Content Creation
Use of, or improper use of, any of the following tools can drastically increase the
chances your site will be removed from search indexes. If you are new to the web
and are running a limited number of websites, it is recommended that you avoid
using these types of tools—especially on any site that is a main source of income.
Most automated content creation tools create content that reads like rubbish.
Some tools such as Traffic Equalizer scrape search results and publish the results as
web pages on your site.
RSS Equalizer can be used to create pages from related RSS feeds. Some people
mix this data to create well-themed and useful web pages. In some regions the web
pages created by RSS Equalizer and Traffic Equalizer may be illegal due to
copyright laws.
ArticleBot is a tool that creates many semantically sound articles from a single
article.
I have not yet used any of the automated content creation tools, but some of my
friends have stated positive things about them. They are usually used on temporary
websites.

Content Costs, Attention, and Quality
If you have a high attention portion of your site, you may want to undermonetize it
such that you do not lose your attention. But if that portion of your site is building
great authority, you can leverage that authority through the rest of your site.
Create some expensive, high-quality content and view those content costs as a
marketing expense. From the leverage that content provides, you can feed off that

authority using dozens or hundreds of decent quality articles that are more
aggressively monetized.

Same Old Stuff
Creating an extremely useful web-based tool, or paying a programmer to create one
for you, is one of the most effective ways to build content, which will, in turn, help
you build natural linkage data. Writing articles will also help you build up your link
popularity.
Many websites blindly add large sums of free content to their site because they
think it will help them for low cost. The problems with adding exact copies of
low-quality articles are the following:
• Since the articles exist elsewhere, yours probably will not rank as well
as one of the other copies on the web.

low-quality content reflects poorly on you and wastes your link equity
that could be going toward getting unique content pages ranked.
• Many people add unfocused garbage to their site, which loses the
interest of their visitors.
• Some unscrupulous parties copy the contents of other websites
without asking. Tools such as CopyScape make this easy to detect,
although legal enforcement is cost prohibitive and too time consuming
for most publishers.
• Many tools scrape various RSS feeds and mix them to create many
content pages. Content generation tools such as these will require
search engines to place even greater trust on linkage data.
Some people also clutter up the Internet with search result screen scrapers and
other auto content generation crap. I am generally against generating low-quality
automated content, as I feel it lowers the quality and functionality of the web as a
whole, though I suppose some people may find it effective for generating traffic (at
least until their sites get banned).

Comparison Content
Many times, people are interested in the difference between two similar or
competing products. I created pages comparing Overture (now known as Yahoo!
Search Marketing) to Google AdWords, and many people search to find the pages
comparing and contrasting those two systems.
Content Format
Sometimes the format of information is as important as its quality. By distributing
information in different formats, it might become easier to pick up inbound links.
For example, good blog posts are often viral marketing link magnets.
Radio is not very competitive in many markets. SEO Rockstars and SEO Radio
are a few SEO-related radio programs that pick up many inbound links. There is
one quarterly print magazine about search marketing; as such, it is easy for them to
gain links because they are the only people distributing content in that format.
Ideal Content
If you can create something that becomes a well-cited authoritative work in your
field, it is worth far more than creating dozens of low-quality pages. The authority
granted by one well-referenced document will help boost the rankings of every
page on your site.
It is a good idea to create day-to-day content, but it is smart from a business
perspective to also try to create a few industry-standard pieces of work. Some
examples of well cited things I have done:

Many free SEO tools
• 101 ways to build links in 2006
• SEO for Firefox
• Industry event calendar
• This book

Deep Linkable Content
If you build a large website and large brand, it is a good idea to try to create nichespecific,
high-quality content that many people will directly reference/link to. This
will help search engines spider your sites better and help them understand that your
site is an authority on much more than just whatever is on the home page.
Free Decent Content
There is a ton of good, free content out there, but you need to do a bit of research
to find it. If you are building a long-term business, quality is usually more
important than quantity. Creative reintegration of other content with some fresh
new content or other features can make your site much more useful to your site
visitors, but you do not want to push it too far, as duplicate content filters improve
daily.
• If you sell products, make sure you grab the official specifications from
the manufacturers.
• Incorporate user feedback into the pages. These can add value to your
shopping experience and give you unique content.
• When you write articles, remember to quote and link to websites of
topical authorities.
• Incorporate product recommendations and related/compatible items
into pages.
• If you have a web-related idea or are researching the history of
something that may have appeared on the web, you can view what a
site looked like in the past from the Internet Archive. You may not be
able to use the old web copy, but screenshots might be acceptable and
how things change certainly makes for good article information.
• Integrate topic-specific RSS feeds into your website.
• Ask a friend to write an article for you or interview an industry expert.
• Search for articles on your topic in search engines. In addition, you
may want to look at article/e-zine directories and glance at industry
hub sites to see if the authors allow you to repost their articles. Many
people who know a decent amount about marketing will let you post
their articles in exchange for a link back to their site.
• Sometimes, it is worth the cost to hire a professional writer. Some of
my friends hire people to write press releases and articles to promote
each new site they create.

Common Content and Copyleft are two projects that aim to help the
free flow of information by allowing people to reuse various registered
content. Yahoo! created a free Creative Commons search.
• Content from prior to 1923 should usually be usable. Material from
1923 to 1963 may be usable depending on whether or not it was
copyrighted, published with a copyright notice, and whether or not the
copyright was renewed.
• The U.S. Government has a bunch of free copy on a variety of topics.
When in doubt, check with Copyright.gov or your local laws. A variety
of government resources are referenced at the end of the chapter.