Wondering how you might be able to get ranked on top for a specific keyword? Thinking there may be a short cut or two? Recently I had the opportunity to work with a client who was also in search of ways to automate much of the search engine optimization process. I started the assignment working with him to improve his website design and architecture. Soon there after, we focused on building links to his site.
by MichaelFleischner


Wondering how you might be able to get ranked on top for a specific keyword? Thinking there may be a short cut or two? Recently I had the opportunity to work with a client who was also in search of ways to automate much of the search engine optimization process. I started the assignment working with him to improve his website design and architecture. Soon there after, we focused on building links to his site.

The concept of off page optimization is really all about building up your site's credibility. As more sites point to your website, Google analyzes the quality of those links and in turn, passes that link value to you. The more quality web sites that refer to your site, the more popular your web site becomes. All of this can be summed up as Google PR or Google Page Rank.

The very first thing to do is to evaluate a web site for the criteria that would make it easy to spider. Search engines spider need to access quality content to better classify each page on the web. After applying navigation that allows users to easily find content and search engine spiders to categorize content properly, its time to identify effective link building strategies.

A great way to build one way links is with directory submissions. The process is simple. All you need to do is to find directories related to your web site niche. There are many directories available and services that can submit your website automatically for review. We decided to use such a service to take the manual labor out of directory submission and target more than three hundred web sites.

In as little as forty eight hours of the website being submitted through an automated submission service, rankings for particular keywords were negatively impacted and significantly. We lost anywhere from ten to thirty spots on search engine rankings. One might be able to argue that the auto submission was not detectable and therefore could not have had this effect. I disagree as there were no other factors related to SEO that we were working on at the time.

The team was not working on any other form of link building and as a result, what happened seems to be directly related to the automatic submission service. The challenge with these types of services is that you really can't tell what type of activity they are engaged in when submitting to directories. All that I know for sure is that our rankings dropped significantly after the submission date.

If you are familiar with search engine optimization and building links to improve your search engine ranking, be cautious of automatic submission services. Whether it be for search engine submission or directory submission, you can damage your current rankings. Major search engines seem to be catching on to automatic submission sites and are having an impact on results. I still encourage you to submit your website to a small number of choice directories but do it one site at a time.

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