Making your online business does not require a lot of money. Making a few worthwhile investments here and there can go a long with with your Internet business. One investment-type that I’d have to recommend is the submission to web directories. Let me explain…

As you’re probably well aware, a web directory is basically a library of Internet websites with titles and descriptions of websites listed in their respected categories. There are thousands upon thousands of web directories on the Internet, but very few are worthwhile investing into.

Web directories are a great way to achieve quality backlinks. Free web directories give webmasters the ability to gain backlinks without a cost, and quality premium web directories cost to have a site listed, but are well worth it.

If you’re looking to have your site spidered and indexed more frequently, and possibly achieve better rankings in search engines, as well as a higher Google PageRank, I’d highly recommend submitting your website to a few HUNDRED or so quality web directories. Better yet, I’d recommend investing some money into a few worthwhile premium web directories - most of the high traffic, high PageStrength, high PageRank web directories have gone commercial, but getting your site listed in one really boosts your website in search engines (especially Google).

Directory Lister is a new website dedicated to serving the webmaster community with the Internet’s best, strongest, and most worthwhile web directories. I’d really suggest checking out the list of premium web directories on that list as there is no list that compares to it if you’re looking to invest a few hundred bucks into your site. Commercial sites, sites that sell products (even through affiliate programs), and sites that offer paid services will always make the best ROI (Return Of Investment).

I’ve been using the list and investing in some premium web directories myself, and have been getting quite a bit of success out of it.

From one webmaster to another, my name is Justice McCay, and I wish you the best of luck with your website. Drop a comment should you have any questions with investing money in web directories.

A lot of new webmasters are unclear about how we actually get backlinks, So in this post I’m going to list a few ways to get other people to link to your site and link to deep pages.

Link Bait - Link bait is often seen as a bad term. The word bait implies that you are somehow tricking someone into linking to your site. Actually, Link bait is a perfectly acceptable way of getting backlinks. All you are doing is giving someone a reason to link to you. Link bait could be anything from a flame, A useful tool or a list of things (like a list of ways to get backlinks, For example).
RSS Feeds - Making an RSS feed available is not only good for your users who can subscribe to it, But it’s also good for getting listed in feed directories where your feed will be parsered by a script server side and hard coded onto their pages. Other sites may also syndicate your content.
Link to me code - Coding a link into a page is easy, right? But it’s easier if you provide some “link to me” code so all someone has to do is copy and past it into their page. You could also provide some images and buttons for people to use. The easier it is the more likely they are to do it.
Web Directories - While web directories tend not to send much traffic, they may send some. So what have you got to lose. Submit to some free directories.
Submit your articles - If you write some unique articles and submit them to article directories you will be able to include some links back to your site within the articles. These articles may also be used by others in the future, Which will get you more links.
Create something link-worthy - This is my favorite. Create something link worthy. If your site is good enough, People will link to it, I guarantee it.
Link Exchanges - Link exchanges can be a good way of getting traffic. If your site is about cats do a couple of link exchanges with other sites about cats and you should get some traffic.
Referrers List - By displaying a list of sites that link to you people will be more likely to link to you hoping to get listed in your referrers list. Services like E-Referrer make this easy to set up.
Forum Sigs - If you become a regular contributor on a forum a link in your signature is a great way of getting a bit of traffic.
Buy Text Links - If you have the budget you may want to consider buying some text links on related high traffic sites.

Link exchanges were popular during the days of the “early Internet”; the late 1990’s and very early 2000’s. Exchanging links with other websites provided webmasters with a bit of traffic, and some boost in their search engine rankings.

Many webmasters of today are exchanging links incorrectly, in the fascination of boosting a site’s Google PageRank. Allow me to define incorrect link exchanges before I keep rambling on..

An incorrect link exchange is when a webmaster decides to exchange links with an IRRELAVENT website just to obtain a large quantity of backlinks to boost both Google PageRank and search engine rankings.

Within the last few years, Google and other major search engines (including both Yahoo! and MSN) have noticed that the purpose of link exchanges on the Internet have devalued. These search engines have now changed their algorithms, the way they rank websites for specific search terms, in the battle against spam and dodgy websites.

Incorrect link exchanges may still boost sites’ Google PageRanks (because of Google’s unique PageRank algorithm), but it will take little effect in effecting a site’s rankings or even traffic.

Exchange links the right way to receive the most out of your website.

If you’re going to exchange links with another website, exchange links with a RELAVENT one. This allows search engines with the ability to “categorize” your website, and gives your website better rankings for search terms that relate to that category (ie: video gaming news website will rank good with video game related search terms).

Personally, I would highly suggest exchanging links with relavent sites SITEWIDE. Sitewide link exchanges allow you to get the most links from a single website to your site, and overall increases your site’s backlink count and link popularity. Sitewide link exchanges also bring your site more traffic from the relavent site that is exchanging links with you - that’s free, targeted traffic to your website.

New concepts have been made by SEO gurus because as stated above, search engines are frequently changing their algorithms (especially to battle dodgy link exchanges). Search engines such as Google can now actually recognize a link exchange going on, and thus the weight of links between the sites are decreased. To battle this, the concept of three-way link exchanging has been proposed.

Three-way link exchanges you to exchange relavent site links with 3+ different websites, as long as each website doesn’t directly link to one another. How this works is Site A links to Site B; Site B links to Site C; and Site C links to Site A. This gives search engines no reference that a link exchange is going on.

For your own reference, you can check out a thread that I created regarding link exchanges and today’s search engine algorithms by clicking here. (Note that my username on that forum is “Monarch” and I am the original author of both that thread.)

I am not saying that link exchanges are worthless; the Internet is a constantly growing library of websites, and there are new ways to exchange links as the old ways to exchange are being devalued by search engines. Think about it: the reason why search engines ever valued link exchanges in the first place is obviously because if an individual found the content of another website valuable, resourceful, or informational, he/she would link to it!

Now…start exchanging links the right way! More targeted traffic and better search engine rankings…for free.

Make a Search Engine’s Job Easy

Search engine spiders have a lot of work to do every month attempting to discover new web pages and update already discovered web pages, trying to distinguish between titles, content, structural code, and even the occasional keyword stuffing by search engine spammers. Simplify your website; make the job easier for the spider and allow the spider to index more pages on your site in a shorter amount of time. Many site owners have paid absolutely no attention to how efficient their code is — this may result in alot of unnecessary code, which results in a bloated code that may be difficult and confusing for a search engine to decipher, or the spider may misinterpret the code.

Consider Moving to a Table-less Layout

Over time, many site owners were able to present visually appealing websites through tabled layouts and visitors quickly became used to the graphic rich and well organized content — therefore with tabled layouts, HTML code became sloppy and full of information that dealt only with the layout of the site, not with the content.

Most site owners know CSS to be a tool that they can use to edit the appearance of text and the colors of their site, but CSS is also a tool that can be used for the layout of your site. As CSS comes out with newer versions, layout will become a more important development. Site owners are reluctant to take the time, energy, and money to really learn HTML and CSS, or to learn how they can make their websites truly accessible; but in the end, they could be hurting their search engine rankings once search engines move closer to identifying natural human language … designing your site properly does take time and effort, but the rewards are numerous.

So how do you move to a table-less layout? The answer is simple … learn HTML and CSS.