Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : Questions about SEO/PR/Alexa

[ErevErick]

After recently discovering what PR and SEO even are (yes I feel extremely stupid for not researching this long ago) , I've recently started manually submitting my site to the following free directories in an attempt to up our back links and PR.
http://www.web-directories.ws/General/Free/page-1.html

EDIT: Side note, is it worth it to submit to directories with no page rank? or should we stick to the PR 1 + sites?

Between myself and a few members of the staff willing to help out with his boring task , we've covered around 400 thus far in about a weeks time. I noticed after the recent Alexa update that our 1 week average had dropped nearly 100k ( www.e-rev.tv) , is this due to the directories reviewing our site? Will this spike back up when we finish the submissions?

Also , I've done as much research as I can on google PR, and I can't find a solid answer on when google PR updates. Does anyone know the time frame they use and when the last update took place?

Appreciate the help in advance.

-Erick

[~ServerPoint~]

No one knows exectly about PR updates.
I think that do things yourself if you don't have skills is time wasting.
What is your main goal with SE? - Getting people which are interested in your deals. And they never look at your PR or Alexa ranking.
I think that you'd better give this job for SEO specialists and start doing SEM

[ErevErick]

Originally Posted by ~ServerPoint~

No one knows exectly about PR updates.
I think that do things yourself if you don't have skills is time wasting.
What is your main goal with SE? - Getting people which are interested in your deals. And they never look at your PR or Alexa ranking.
I think that you'd better give this job for SEO specialists and start doing SEM

Well , in all honesty, what skills are needed to submit links to directories? I've read a lot of success stories of people up'ing their PR by doing it manually and posting their press releases.

Our main goal is to simply have our page rank go from 0 to anything higher than what it is. We would also like to appear higher than our competitors ( we only have 4 world wide) on google and so on.

Just to clear things up, we aren't a hosting company , in fact we don't sell anything. We're a broadcasting company and our revenue will stim from ad's placed on the site as well as being paid to cover LAN events.

[dawhb]

You are happy not to know more about PR and Alexa rank. Alexa rank does not worth because their algorithm can be cheated and most people does it. So do not count on Alexa rank? Just build your site for a better users experience and that's it.

[astutiumRob]

Originally Posted by ErevErick

After recently discovering what PR and SEO even are

The only people that harp on about PR are those trying to seel you some snake-oil website on sitepoint forums

Search engines dont buy things - make you site user friendly and human readable ...

Originally Posted by ErevErick

I've recently started manually submitting my site to the following free directories

How many times have *you* used a free directory to research something and get a link to a product - exactly !

Originally Posted by ErevErick

I noticed after the recent Alexa update that our 1 week average had dropped nearly 100k

There are so many well documented reasons why the Alexa rank is a worthless metric, that its not even worth visiting their site to check it.

I'd start by fixing the obvious errors with your website - it'l do more than any amount of submitting to directories.

[ErevErick]

Originally Posted by othellotech

The only people that harp on about PR are those trying to seel you some snake-oil website on sitepoint forums

Search engines dont buy things - make you site user friendly and human readable ...


How many times have *you* used a free directory to research something and get a link to a product - exactly !


There are so many well documented reasons why the Alexa rank is a worthless metric, that its not even worth visiting their site to check it.

I'd start by fixing the obvious errors with your website - it'l do more than any amount of submitting to directories.

Appreciate your response. The only reason we've submitted to the free directories were for the back links to improve the PR. Again , we don't actually sell products, we sell our content. And were hoping a higher PR would improve our advertisement appeal. Thanks again for the input.

[infinite_in]

I've a .tv blog that has currently PR:3, in my experience back linking with media sites helped a lot particularly for .tv, now I am expecting PR 5 plus in next update.

[RatePointGuy]

PR is important, but the best way to improve PR is to provide more relevant content and be linked together with other sites that have high PR. If I were you I wouldn't submit to any directories with a PR lower than 3 or 4. It's just not valuable for your business otherwise. Spend more of that time finding partners or writing press releases.

PR usually updates 2 or 3 times a year, but nobody really knows when.

Alexa is a fickle ranking system. It's fairly useless until you're above the 100K mark and even then it does fluctuate wildly. I would not use this as the sole indicator of how well you're doing on the web. I'd recommend checking out Quantcast and Compete as well, and of course, get a good historical look at your own analytics and stats, that's the only information that truly matters.

I also recommend checking out www.websitegrader.com. It will do a free review of your site for technical SEO issues and give you some suggestions on how you can improve. (They may call you to try to sell you SEO services, but I think it's worth it.)

[ErevErick]

Originally Posted by RatePointGuy

PR is important, but the best way to improve PR is to provide more relevant content and be linked together with other sites that have high PR. If I were you I wouldn't submit to any directories with a PR lower than 3 or 4. It's just not valuable for your business otherwise. Spend more of that time finding partners or writing press releases.

PR usually updates 2 or 3 times a year, but nobody really knows when.

Alexa is a fickle ranking system. It's fairly useless until you're above the 100K mark and even then it does fluctuate wildly. I would not use this as the sole indicator of how well you're doing on the web. I'd recommend checking out Quantcast and Compete as well, and of course, get a good historical look at your own analytics and stats, that's the only information that truly matters.

I also recommend checking out www.websitegrader.com. It will do a free review of your site for technical SEO issues and give you some suggestions on how you can improve. (They may call you to try to sell you SEO services, but I think it's worth it.)

thank you very much for your insight , i'll defiantly check out those sites. A quick side note, what are the best sites to submit your press releases to? free/paid? Thanks again

[plumsauce]

Alexa *can* be useful.

People that talk about gaming Alexa are quite right. However, that applies to sites gaming Alexa in order to bump their apparent traffic while they are trying to sell the site.

If you are *not* gaming Alexa, then it can be quite useful to take a look at the long term trends in the graphs once in a while.

Use them as trend indicators, not absolutes and you will find them quite informative. If you also watch other systems, you will soon get a feel for how the graphs react.

[Verticity]

Originally Posted by ErevErick

After recently discovering what PR and SEO even are (yes I feel extremely stupid for not researching this long ago) , I've recently started manually submitting my site to the following free directories in an attempt to up our back links and PR.
http://www.web-directories.ws/General/Free/page-1.html

EDIT: Side note, is it worth it to submit to directories with no page rank? or should we stick to the PR 1 + sites?

Between myself and a few members of the staff willing to help out with his boring task , we've covered around 400 thus far in about a weeks time. I noticed after the recent Alexa update that our 1 week average had dropped nearly 100k ( www.e-rev.tv) , is this due to the directories reviewing our site? Will this spike back up when we finish the submissions?

Also , I've done as much research as I can on google PR, and I can't find a solid answer on when google PR updates. Does anyone know the time frame they use and when the last update took place?

Appreciate the help in advance.

-Erick

Well whichi PR ur talking about? google status bar or google search engine?? if u r talking about Google IE bar then it take s 6 to 8 months to be update. if u r talking about google search engine then it changes oftenly.
I would again suggest these sites for SEO books.

Download Free Software
SEO Book
Softwares Download

[nuclei]

Alexa is skewed at the very least to the point of being unusable and unreliable as an indicator.

Toolbar PageRank (the pretty green bar) is worthless. Do not even allow yourself to be concerned with it. It is not a true indicator of the PageRank google uses in ranking considerations, and nobody knows or can see those values but google themselves.

Pay more attention to getting your keywords in the anchor text of all links you aquire, as the anchor boost is far easier to measure.

Pay attention to the actual quality of the website you want linked from. IE: do it's users like it. Is it ranked well for its own keywords. Do a lot of people link to them for being a solid resource. Is their theme related to your own.

The above are far better things to concern yourself with.

[MrCat]

Well , in all honesty, what skills are needed to submit links to directories? I've read a lot of success stories of people up'ing their PR by doing it manually and posting their press releases.

--- Submitting your site manually to directories is your best opt. You get to choose the most appropriate category this way as compared to automated services.

[~ServerPoint~]

Our main goal is to simply have our page rank go from 0 to anything higher than what it is. We would also like to appear higher than our competitors ( we only have 4 world wide) on google and so on.

I think that the main goal for wemaster who are doing SEO for own web site - number of visitors and sometimes placement and PR do not influence on it.

[nuclei]

Originally Posted by MrCat

Well , in all honesty, what skills are needed to submit links to directories? I've read a lot of success stories of people up'ing their PR by doing it manually and posting their press releases.

--- Submitting your site manually to directories is your best opt. You get to choose the most appropriate category this way as compared to automated services.

You are paying attention to the pretty green bar again. Obsessing over PR will not help you much really. Great, so your site lights up the bar, it will not help your traffic numbers. Directories are a great starting point, but unless it is an extremely uncompetitive keyword, directories alone will not get you ranked.

As far as automated services, I agree fully with you.