Newcomers who just starting off with their websites, often ask why directory submissions are important or even necessary to their online business.
Everyone who owns an Internet business wants to increase their online presence to better implement their business marketing strategies, and improve their bottom line sales.
Unless you pay someone to do it for you; it takes a great deal of time and effort to get your website noticed by the search engines, and to start generating a decent amount of traffic to your site.
This is why directory submissions are important to your business.
Backlinks play a huge role with the search engines in determining your ranking position.
When you manage to acquire a large quantity of quality backlinks, or “inbound links”; it will have a huge positive impact on your ranking position with the search engines.
Of the many ways to attract backlinks; one of the easiest is to submit your website URL to the online link directories.
These directories provide links that are categorized for easy access, and listed under relevant topics, to web users looking for specific information.
If this sounds like a search engine; you’re almost right on.
In the infancy of the Internet, directories used to be the main source for web surfers finding websites on various subjects.
Today the search engines have just about replaced the directories however, they are still useful, especially for SEO purposes.
This is why directory submissions are important, and why no website owner should ever ignore them as an optimization strategy.
When you submit your website URL to a directory, you must deal with the human equation. This can be a benefit as well as a detriment.
A real person will review your submission, and determine how unique and relevant your website is.
If your website is approved by the editor, it will be included in the directory where your credibility will be immediately established with the search engines.
There are some directories that provide feeds to other directories, and other search engines. When you submit your website to one of these directories; you are automatically submitting it to 10, 20, 30, or more different directories.
The search engines place a relevance on the directories, when they determine the popularity of a website.
They are able to determine your relevance, and qualify your website according to the quality of the directory that you submitted your site to, as well as the number of backlinks you already have on your website.
On a new website that may be short on content; the search engine robots may not initially be able to properly categorize your site.
However, if your site is submitted to a directory under a specific category, the search engine “bots” will be able to properly categorize, or “index” your site, under a relevant topic.
This is why directory submissions are important to your ranking.
With our current economic conditions and this soft market; now could be the best time to jump into online advertising and become an online marketing expert.
If you’ve put off starting a home based internet marketing business, and think you missed the boat; you may be surprised to learn that the economy has prompted many companies to advertise much more frequently online.
The traditional advertising media such as television, newspapers, and magazines, have been losing viewers, subscribers, and buyers to the point that many have had to drastically cut their labor force, in order to just stay afloat.
This is not the case with free media sources like radio and the Internet. Since the recession started, their audiences have actually grown, and savvy companies have taken note of this.
Because many companies have moved to using the Internet and radio for their advertising; a greater opportunity now exists to make some serious money promoting online advertising.
To become an online advertising expert, you need to fine tune your advertising strategy to keep up with your competition.
Determine what strategies work best for you and stay with them.
Hire some good copywriters to beef up your sales pages, squeeze pages, and email content to provide impulse buying triggers that will psychologically get your buyers to part with their money.
Many buyers who are too scared to spend right now, can be convinced by good online advertising content.
Now is a good time to monetize your websites with other peoples advertisements to earn some additional income.
Pay Dot Com can provide you with a list of companies that advertise online, and pay commissions based on actual sales or leads. Or, you can pick your product and sign up as an affiliate if they have an active program.
During a recession, the competition for the consumer’s dollar is particularly fierce; so you really need to become an online marketing expert to enjoy a piece of the pie.
Sign up to some of your competitor’s newsletters or affiliate programs, and make sure you know what promotions your competitors are using.
You can learn what your competitors do to squeeze money from their clients, and then use the information to become more innovative and creative, and improve your marketing strategies.
To be successful with online advertising, you need to thoroughly understand the difference between pay per lead, pay per sale, pay per click, and cost per action networks.
Decide on which advertising models you want to get involved with, which will pay the most money for your online advertising efforts, and then just go for it!
As we all know, Google’s AdSense is a great way for newcomers to start earning money right away on the Internet, however getting your site approved for Google AdSense can be a problem if you don’t follow some simple suggestions. 
First of all, Google is not as persnickety as they make themselves out to be, and it doesn’t take months of website development to get an approval. In fact your site can be approved in as little as a few days, and sometimes even less.
There are really just two tricks you need to learn.
1 – Set up and start with a blogger hosted website or blog. Blogger is a part of Google, and your site will get indexed a thousand percent faster starting out with Blogger. You can always change later.
2 – Make your blog, or website look like you will be providing nothing but content. DO NOT set it up with any advertisements right out of the box!
The less selling you appear to be doing on your approval site, the better off you will be.
Your primary goal should be getting your site approved for Google AdSense.
Once you’re approved, you can use the pub code on any website you want without having to go through the entire process again.
Concentrate on putting nothing but good unique content on your approval site, and follow up with more content.
The most important thing you can do when dealing with Google, is to ALWAYS PROVIDE GOOD UNIQUE CONTENT on your websites or blogs.
In addition to the two main tricks noted above; you should also focus on these three elements for getting your site approved for Google AdSense.
1 – The Look And Feel Of Your Site
Google doesn’t want their AdSense ads placed on a website that looks like a piece of garbage.
On the other hand, they don’t expect everyone to come up with a $1,000 to $20,000 professionally designed website.
Make your website presentable by following the industry standards for website usability.
Don’t have a tacky website with unprofessional color combination, wild graphics, and distracting backgrounds. In short, use your common sense!
2 – Provide A Reasonable Amount Of Good Content
Again, the most important thing you need to do is submit at least 15 to 20 pages of good article content, or resources.
As I already stated, Google believes in good content. So if you try to get your website or blog approved with just 4 or 5 pages; you will probably strike out the first time your site is submitted.
3 – Get Some Traffic To Your Site
Although there is a common belief that Google will not accept your site without any web traffic; that is NOT necessarily the case.
However, the chances of getting your site approved for Google AdSense are greatly improved when you already have some web traffic.
Here are some nifty tricks you can use for getting traffic fast.
- Grab 15 to 25 good article content from a quality article directory like ezinearticles.com, or goarticles.com, and place them on your website, or blog. Just remember to include the source of the articles.
- Create a simple website using the articles that you picked up from the article directory. Place the articles in a logical order on your site, with a contact page, a standard privacy policy, and a typical disclaimer. That’s your site!
- Before submitting your website to Google for approval, be sure to make a few posts at a couple forums with your website URL in the signature file, to help you generate some immediate traffic to your site.
Getting your site approved for Google AdSense isn’t rocket science, it just takes some knowledge, some time, and a bit of effort to get that valued pub – code!
