Last year around this time, I took the plunge for the Yahoo Directory - paying my $299 review fee. I was reviewed and added here: http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/Illinois/Cities/Aurora/Real_Estate/

Since then, I can honestly say, the amount of traffic I have received from being listed has been minor - likely in the single digits. For many webmasters, the dilema of the Yahoo directory is obvious. $300 is somewhat expensive - one of the highest review fees out there and it’s annual too. Many webmasters measure the benefit of a directory by direct traffic - it’s farily well-known that the SEO aspect of many of them have been reduced over the years. However, there are a few that still generate some benefit - including the Yahoo Directory. However, when it comes down to it, is the benefit worth the cost?

For now, I am fairly content to continue paying the fee. I justify it by thinking of how much I pay every time I send out a mailing - $299 per year is a drop in the bucket compared to some of the costs of print advertising. In the future, I might review this decision and if there are better options out there, I may choose to discontinue my membership - only time will tell.

I’ve gone back and forth several times about the value of submitting to directories. Right now, I feel that directories are a good option for site submission for several reasons. First, you might get some traffic because of your listing. Second, it gives your site good search engine exposure and means that your page should get crawled more often. Third, the one way link always helps. And finally, because there are lots of options out there for both free and paid submits.

I do understand that directories are not considered as authoratative as websites in your niche with the same them. It’s hard to relate a general web directory with a subject such as Real Estate when there is probably only a single category and perhaps a handful of subcategories related to the subject. Also, many of the free-submit directories tend to go defunct or never rise above the crowd, meaning that your listing will probably never count for much.

However, there are several large directories that are useful - the Yahoo directory for one. This authoratative directory is bound to help drive traffic to your site and also lends weight to your page as being an authority site. Some other directories have gained good traffic and are very worth it to submit to.

Now that reciprocal linking is greatly de-valued, one way links are very important for building the value of your website. Directories often represent one of the best ways you can capitalize on one way links. Plus, many of these directories being free to submit to, you might get on one in the early free stages and wind up with a solid backlink in a year or so. Can’t beat the price of that!

Perhaps the goal of any website owner is to drive traffic (and in the real of real estate - convertable prospects) to your page. Perhaps the top way to do that from a broad based audience is through gaining positions in the search engines - namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s no secret that Google is the king of the hill right now - driving much more traffic than Yahoor or MSN. It’s also no secret that links play a big part in Google rankings.

Essentially when a website links to yours, it casts a “vote” for your website. The more votes, the more popular your website is seen. Now, this is a greatly simplified view as Google supposedly uses over 50 different calculations to rank your site, but linking is a big part of it.

The goal in linking is to obtain a solid 1-way link from a website that has some authority in your subject to your site. Reciprocal linking (I.E. - putting a link to a site on your page in return for a link to your page from theirs) is now considered a redundant form of linking because search engines have been devaluing those links. So, since obtaining one-way links is considered much more valuable in terms of search engine rankings, it’s worth a look at some of the ways you can obtain one way links to your site.

There are several well-known ways of getting one way links to your site:

• submit your site to paid or free directories
• write articles about your subject and release them to various article sites
• write press releases about your business and release them to various PR sites
• attract natural links through “link bait” or other tactics
• sponsor wordpress or link directory themes
• pay for links

Some of these are more valuable than others and over the next few posts, I’m going to be talking about each of these methods - how they’re done and how you can start doing them.

There are a few basic dillemas that every webmaster eventually comes to in the design and implementation of good SEO (search engine optimization). The biggest is likely:

1. Should I sacrifice rankings for content or (gulp) content for rankings?

The answer to this question is probably the single biggest issue with designing for the internet. On one hand, you need a real estate website that a user is going to be able to easily navigate, find what they’re looking for and, ultimately, contact you. Remember, a website’s main function for you, the agent, is a lead generator. If users are so confused with your entry page that they don’t click through, you won’t get any leads. We’re talking about conversion here - how well your website converts visitors into leads. Often, when we optimize for SEO, we ignore content, but that can really hurt in the conversion department if the public sees your site as convoluted or childish.

However, if you have the best website in the world and noone knows it’s there, how will you even be able to convert visitors to leads because no one is visiting? You need to play the SEO game at some level but that often means sacrificing content. But is there a happy medium? I believe there is to a certain extent.

The key is to narrow your scope. If you’re talking about Aurora Real Estate, your website should mostly be about Aurora Real Estate - adding other communities to the picture means you have to *say* something about those communities, thus dilluting your scope. Why is a narrow scope so important? Well, in the SEO world, keywords are of ultimate importance. It’s about how often you mention a few key words and how they are displayed. The key to optimizing naturally is to dedicate your entire website to a particular word or two. That way, your text should naturally revolve around those particular subjects. And, since you aren’t dilluting the theme with extra text not related to those keywords, it should be easy to stick to the main point and not drift.

As many of you know, page rank is a statistic assigned by the Google search engine and is intended to represent the importance of a certain page. However, there is a lot of controversy surrounding this statistic. For one, it seems to have an unknown bearing on SERP (search engine results page) rankings. For example, searching for Aurora Real Estate in Google brings up a site with a PR of 0 as the #4 organic result. Granted, this is from a site with high traffic rank, and probably high trust rank (two statistics that I’ll probably discuss later), but still….

 The Google algorithm remains a mystery for most of us and the way Page Rank fits into the SERPs is even more unknown. However, many webmasters still see page rank as a valuable tool. Page rank is a desierable factor when requesing reciprocal link exchanges - many sites want a certain page rank in order to consider a trade. While it’s possible for a large corporate website to get a high ranking based upon traffic and trust and zero page rank, it’s fair to estimate that it’s going to be important for the little guys - me and you - to get a fair page rank in order to compete. If the Google algorithm is a combination of factors, having a low page rank might be fine if you’re in the top 1,000 sites for traffic, but if you’re not, you need a combination of factors to help bring your site to the top of the SERPs.