Onpage SEO for web directory siteowners.

So, you have just setup your web directory and spent a bundle on a very elegant and eye-catching design. You sit back and await the expected crowd to come. But somehow, you don't seem to be able to attract visitors and worse of all, your site isn't ranking highly in the Search Engines. What do you do?

How about making your web directory Search Engine friendly (SEF) through Search Engine Optimization(SEO) techniques? The best (and free) way to get visitors is through Search Engines and from Organic Searches. They can be your number one source which drives the all important traffic to your directory. What you need is a little patience, hardwork and some juicy tips to help you get started for your web directory<.

So here is some easy to follow Onpage Optimization tips for a web directory webmaster (owner).

1. URL Rewrite must be on. This option creates static looking URLs by removing the dynamic variables or session ids and since Search Engines don't like dynamic URLs, this can help in your site being indexed faster. And, arguably, static URLs (hence Static Pages) can rank higher than dynamic URLs (dynamic Pages). Dynamic URLs can cause duplicate content problem for your directory as well and this will hurt you in the rankings. Apache Servers and even IIS Servers have mods or modules to help create static looking URLs. One important thing to remember is to avoid session ids whenever possible!
2. Have a good keyword rich title for your directory. This is very important for Search Engine rankings as they place relevance on titles tags. Try to use the keywords first on your title tag, then followed by your directory name, for example , "Free Quality Web Directory | Submit URL | Power Directory". You can see the keywords Free, Quality, Web Directory and Submit URL come first before the directory name. For your categories and subcategories, make sure that the title tag changes accordingly. Domain names with keywords can help too, but I believe that their value in ranking is not that great.
3. Good Keywords in your categories and subcategories names which in turn produce meaningful URLs which again helps in ranking for these terms. Remember, keywords in URLs are important and you should use them effectively to get good rankings. For example "http://www.yourdirectory.com/cars/showroom/" have the "cars" and "showroom" keywords in them. Try not to have "and" or "or" in the category names as they are useless and Search Engine spider don't use them. But of course, you should make them look natural to your visitors.
4. Avoid having your category links too deep. Search Engines don't like crawling deep into your site to find your listings and having subdirectories which are too deep will affect your rankings if they don't get indexed or don't get indexed often. It is my opinion that you should not have more than 5 levels deep.
5. No broken links. Broken links prevents Search Engine spiders from indexing your directory completely. It also discourages the spiders from crawling your directory because of this.
6. Good Internal links & No dead end pages. Make sure every page you have is linked to your main directory page or some other page. Just like broken links, they disrupt the Search Engine spiders from finishing or doing their job, which is to index your site. And even internal links do pass PageRank to their destination URLs, so make use of these links to get PageRank to your internal as well as your mainpage. Even pages with "zero" PR has still a little PR to pass onto their destination links. Having a good internal linkage can also help Search Engine navigate your directory properly.
7. Good keyword rich descriptions for your links, at least 300 words or more. Make sure your visitors submit meaningful descriptions with good keywords and without any spelling mistakes, so that your directory won't look like a link farm to Search Engines and spammy to your visitors. Your directory is a QUALITY directory, remember? A good description for each URL makes your directory listing look professional and helps your image. It also helps your visitors understand what that URL is all about. Do edit the descriptions submitted by your visitors if needed.
8. Anchor text for your menus. A often forgotten way to get proper keywords anchor text to your pages is through internal links. I have seen a lot of directories failing to use their menus anchor text properly. Choose proper anchor text for your menus. Instead of using "Home" to point to your mainpage, give it a name like "Web Directory". If you have 1000 pages, that is 1000 anchor text "Web Directory" pointing to your mainpage. Although internal anchor text are probably less valued than anchor text from external sources for obvious reasons, they still do help to rank for those keywords.
9. Uptime is very important. What's the point of doing all the SEO in the world when Search Engine spiders can't even find your site because it is down. Get a good and reliable webhost with a solid uptime.
10. Sitemaps can really help spiders navigate your directory so create them and submit to the Search Engines like Yahoo! and Google. This is especially true if you have a lot of categories in your directory. You should also create a html sitemap for other Search Engines. Make sure your html sitemap is linked from your mainpage so that when Search Engines crawl, they don't have to go deep into your categories and subcategories before reaching your links. You should also create RoR Sitemaps as well.
11. Content other than just links. Try including a forum or a blog inside your directory. Or maybe an related article directory. You need content to rank well, links alone just won't cut it for Search Engines. I always believe that having a forum or a blog is a good complement to any site. Just make sure you are active in it.
12. Avoid empty categories. One of the faults of using directory scripts is that pages may look very similar to each other due to the use of templates. And if some of your categories doesn't have any links or descriptions in them, they may seem to be duplicate to Search Engines. With duplicate content penalty now strictly enforced, it is best to avoid having empty categories. For Google, if any of your category page goes into Supplemental Results, it is very hard to get it out. And worse still, usually Supplemental Pages will be crawled less often. When your visitors visit your directory and discover a lot of empty categories and it looks like a ghost town, they won't be impressed at all.
13. Do it yourself. Yes, instead of waiting for someone else to submit websites to your directory, go add listings to your directory yourself. If you happen to come across some interesting site, do not hestiate to submit them to your own directory. Content people, content. This gives Search Engines something to munch on when you first start your directory. Best of all, if you give value to your visitors, they will come back for more.
14. Updated content. Search Engines love pages that are updated often and will crawl more frequently if they do. So try to update your pages often. However, unlike other sites, for web directories is difficult to have constantly updated content. One of the best way to do that is to include RSS feeds from other sources. Or have your "latest links" displayed on your mainpage.
15. RSS Feeds. A lot of directory scripts have features which help create RSS feeds. One of the things I discovered is that Googlebot loves it. My "latest links" feed has been spidered very frequently. Probably because they love constantly updated content and the "latest links" is one that updated more often than your other pages. This is a good example why you should constantly update your directory.
16. Meta Tags are less important, but if you can, make sure the meta tags are relevant to your category. Another thing, try to have different meta keywords and meta description per category instead of using the main directory's. Also good and unique meta descriptions can help prevent duplicate content problem in your directory.

This onpage optimization article only covers what you can do on your own web directory, it doesn't cover offpage optimization which can be very effective in getting good rankings in Search Engines as well. But if you use a combination of offpage and onpage optimization, you should get even better results.

This is an updated article.

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Other articles:
Internal Links - How to make full use of them
Effective Directory Submission
Increasing your Page Rank In Detail
Link Exchanges Techniques
Additional Benefits of a High Page Rank (PR)
Secondary Article Writing - Link Baiting
Sneaky Bastard's Way of Getting Backlinks
Tiny Preview and Screenshots for PhpLinkDirectory V3.2.0
Outgoing links - Telling Search Engines what your page is all about
A Complete list of Directory Scripts
How NOT to run a directory - a submitter's point of view
Some tips for the paid directory owner
How often does Google cache your Site? A Project.
Raising PR - Problems with paid directories and what to do.
Our exclusive interview with Paul le Roux of WebWobot Search Engine
Good Planning = Good SEO = Results!
Article Writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Forget keywords meta-tag and think keyword density!