One of our head marketing consultants had the privilege of attending the Winter Bash event last week with celebrity blogger Zack Taylor (www.ZackTaylor.ca). Needless to say, he had an amazing time meeting celebrities, and promoting WebStar Multimedia.

You never know who you might meet at a social gathering, even at a trendy club / bar. People you meet on the street, might choose to write about you (give you a one way link), refer you to someone else, or even hire you for their own project. This is what I like to call ‘Social Search Engine Optimiation’ or simply, Social SEO.

You can arguably say that Dmoz is the best free directory on the net, and probably the most trusted. To check if your website has been included in the Dmoz directory swap your URL with ours in the following link: http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=webstarmultimedia.com.

As a Dmoz editor, I can say that the number one thing we look for when editing a website is the quality of the content. If your content is not original than you will have a hard time getting accepted in this directory.
Yahoo Directory Links

Yahoo Directory is one of the most important paid directories online, along with Business.com. To check if your company is listed, see the following link: http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=100&dups=1&p=linkdomain:www.webstarmultimedia.com++site:dir.yahoo.com

If your website is not listed, and you’re a non commercial site, than you can submit it for free. If it is a commercial site, you’re looking at $300US for inclusion.
Yahoo Inbound Links

Yahoo inbound links are a great way to monitor your link building progress. It’s also a great tool to see how your competitors are building links. When looking for new ways to build links, I often use the following tool to see who others have built links with: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webstarmultimedia.com&bwm=i&bwmf=s&bwmo=&fr2=seo-rd-se.
Who is

Who is tool from Domain Tools provides some potentially useful information about one’s URL and website. Check out: http://whois.domaintools.com/webstarmultimedia.com to find out about your own URL or someone else’s.

Ideally, you can still carry on traditional SEO strategies, but also incorporate new ones.  If you want to compete in tomorrow’s SEO world, than social SEO might be your best bet.  Social SEO can be defined as a method used to promote your site by creating awareness on social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Youtube or bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us and Digg.  Social media types include forums, blogs, message boards, wikis and pod casts. 

Anyway you can create a ‘buzz’ around your site, you are surely guaranteed to bring in traffic.  If you have good content, people will link to you.  You can even consider Social SEO as a form of link building.

Best way to start your Social SEO campaign is to register on sites such as Facebook, MySpace and create a company or website profile.  Add pictures, write descriptions and put links up to your website.  You can also register at bookmarking sites and ’tag’ your own website.

Just remember, the more profiles you have, the more you ‘tag’, the more traffic you will get…and ultimately, the higher your search engine ranks will be.   

What you will find is many ‘General Directories’ out there are loosing their significance.  General directories tend to produce little to no traffic whatsoever.  If you’re submitting your website to a general directory simply for ‘link juice’; don’t be mistaken – major search engines can acknowledge the fact that there is little relevance between your website and the general directory you submit to, and therefore putting very little weight on the link established.  There are a select few general directories that are still worth submitting to.  My top 3 include:

http://www.dmoz.org – Free submission (but probably the hardest directory to get in to), and most likely the most valuable directory link you can create.  If you get into this directory, you are also in Google’s Directory, since Google uses Dmoz results for their own directory.  

http://dir.yahoo.com – This paid submission directory has a recurring annual fee of approximately $300.  Yahoo directory provides a very trusted link and also generates  quite a bit of traffic.

http://botw.org – This paid submission directory has 2 options for payment.  You can either pay a recurring fee of approximately $100, or $250 for a one time fee.  This directory has been around the longest and boasts the fact that they only cater to the ‘best of the web’.  BOTW is a very trusted link according to the search engines.

If you are a business than you might want to look into http://www.business.com. This paid directory is very good for businesses in many industries.  It also has a pricy recurring fee, just like Yahoo!, but has a fair bit of traffic and also provides a trusted link.

The future of directory submissions and link building for search engine optimizers is in niche directories.  By submitting to a directory in your niche market, you are creating links that are much more related to your content and thus more trusted by the search engines.  Ultimately you can expect higher search engine rankings by creating fewer, more trusted links; as apposed to 10 times the amount of less important links.

For example, if you are a Canadian mortgage company you may want to look for mortgage directories or perhaps even real estate directories.  Another good option is to seek Canadian based directories where you can submit your website to.  All these directories would be highly relevant and would be more beneficial than submitting to spammy, general, low traffic directories.

There are a few good lists of directories out there.  One fantastic, but more general directory one is: http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/.  

In essence, stick with the top general directories, and search for the niche / relevant directories to submit to.  Directory listings should not be your only means of link building, but should be one of several means of building valuable one-way back links.

I started off like any other person curious about learning search engine optimization.  I Googled various terms like ‘SEO’, and was overwhelmed with millions of results.  Many sources seem to have repetitive information.  Sure you will also find a variety of perspectives – but who can you trust with your SEO knowledge? 

Over a period of time, I have researched various SEO resources and have developed a top 5 list.  This is not to say that these are the top resources for SEO necessarily…this just happens to be my favourite ones.  The below list is in no particular order:

1. www.seobook.com
2. www.bruceclay.com
3. www.seomoz.org
4. www.searchenginewatch.com
5. www.google.com/support/webmasters/   

I know the last one is a little ironic because it’s Google.  But hey, if anyone is going to tell you how you can market your website properly and rank well on the largest search engine in the world…than that person must be Google.

When considering which directories to submit to here are some important factors to think about: Try focusing on building valuable links, as apposed to large numbers of meaningless links. Submitting your site to thousands of general directories that list spammy sites will only tell the search engines that you are in fact one of those spammy sites too. Look for web directories with lots of traffic. Make sure the page you wish to be listed on is actually in the search results. For example, type in Google: “site:directory.com/page-i-will-be-listed-on.html” to see if the page you are about to submit to is actually indexed.

Look for niche directories in your particular industry. If you are an event planner, type ‘event planner directory’ or ‘event planner listings’ in Google and the major search engines. A good rule of thumb to follow: if the search engines find the site valuable and list it in the top 20, than it might not be a bad idea to be listed on their site too.

Keep analyzing the first 20-30 search engine results for different keyword phrases that pertain to your industry or business. Write out a list of websites (not direct competitors) and prepare a method to approach them for a link exchange. Yes I did actually suggest reciprocating links. But be aware, only do this if a) in fact you are exchanging links with someone in your industry and b) if it’s in your best interest to do so (i.e. this website / page gets a lot of traffic that would benefit your site).

Writing good content is probably the olderst form of link building. When the internet was just evolving and websites were nothing pretty to look at, webmasters would surf the web and when they stumbled upon some interesting content, they would often link this content to their website. This is still true to this day – if you have unique and valuable content than you have the best link bait you can ask for.

Writing outside of your website is also a popular means of getting quality inbound links. Write articles that are related to your business and submit them to article search engines. You can also post meaningful comments on blogs and forums and put anchor text inside the comment or conclude your post with a signature that is linked back to your website (this also can be done with articles). Be careful with blogs, since most bloggers avoid spammers by putting a ‘no follow’ tag to prevent spammers from getting any link juice from their posts.

In general, when building a link think about its value in terms of traffic. If your doing it solely for search engine rankings, than it’s probably not the best of links. A good resource for link building strategies is http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2160301. Lastly, if your still to lazy or simply don’t have time to do a proper link building campaign, than you can always higher a professional to do it. One piece of advice: make sure you receive some kind of report on what kind of links they are building and where they are getting it from.

The most common misconception about the alt attribute is when people use them to insert a description about a particular image.  The alt attribute should be used as it was originally designed to be used – in place of an image which cannot be displayed.  Therefore, people with slower bandwidth computers, hand held devices, screen readers (for those who are visually impaired), can appreciate the image that the website is trying to display.  For example, you have an image of a magnifying glass on your website. When a user clicks on this image/link a search function is then enabled.  A good use of an alt attribute would be to insert alt=”search” in your code.  

The alt attribute is mandatory for images according to HTML 4.01 guidelines.  If an image’s purpose is solely for ’eye candy’, than you don’t need to include alt attributes such as alt=”spacer”.  This serves no purpose to people using screen readers, and can actually get quite annoying.  Instead, simply include an empty alt attribute: alt=”", with no spaces in between the quotations.

The title attribute is where you can include a description of the image / link.  Back to the magnifying glass example – if your alt=”search”, your title=”search the entire website” as an example.  When creating your alt attributes and title attributes, keep in mind what they were actually designed to do. 

In Internet Explorer (IE), you will see the alt attribute appearing as a tool tip.  IE’s error has undoubtedly caused a lot of confusion in the online world.  This is simply a bug, that I assume will be fixed in the near future.  If you wish to prevent the alt attribute from displaying as a tool tip in IE, simply add an empty title attribute: title=”".  If you wish to show your readers a tool tip, this is through the use of the title attribute.

Knowing how to use alt and title attributes properly can give you an edge in your SEO campaign.  Especially in regards to the alt attribute - it has become known that Google does cache this text and perhaps may even use the alt attribute as the heading for images in Google Images.  Therefore, proper uses of the alt tag throughout your site is known to improve search engine optimization efforts.  Misuse of the alt attribute, such as spamming (keyword stuffing) can get your website penalized by the major search engines or perhaps even removed.  As a rule of thumb, make your alt attributes no longer than 100 characters. The title attribute can be longer than the alt attribute (which is quite normal).  However, keep in mind that certain browsers such as Mozilla, only display the first 60 characters of the title attribute. 

Yes it’s true that search engines have evolving technologies and yes the algorithms change periodically as well. The key to staying ahead of the game is to keep analyzing your results and tweaking your SEO campaign. You can also visit the top SEO blogs and forums for all the latest updates.

But ideally, as long as you keep generating rich SEO content, keep building quality and related one way back-links, tweaking your on-page factors and analyzing your results – you will find yourself continually progressing towards the top of the search engine rankings.