The Best of the Web Directory offer of 25% throughout August will end in a few days.

Use the promo code: SIZZLE25 when ordering directory submissions, sponsorship ads and blog advertising to get your saving.

The earnings that a webmaster receives through a website depends on hosting costs, volume of traffic and converting visitors into customers. 3FN.net can help with all the important parts of running an online business, whether it involves selling products or services such as advertising.

To increase the visitors to a site a webmaster needs to either buy traffic through pay per click advertising or rank highly in the search engines through online marketing. 3FN.net has the tools and expertise to use both of these approaches to increase the traffic, using proven keyword research, PPC advertising and search engine optimization techniques.

3NF also provide partnership networks and targeted contextual advertising programmes to help webmasters generate income from the visitors they attract to their site.

And don’t forget the hosting for your site. A dedicated server provider can have a big impact on an online business. Good quality cheap hosting reduces your overheads and helps to increase your profit margin.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process used to get higher search engine results. It involves optimising a website so it is ‘search engine friendly’, which means it is easy for the search engines to crawl, and building it’s popularity, so that search engines rank it higher than competing websites.

SEO can be broken down into five steps:

Step 1 Keyword Research

The first step in search engine optimisation (SEO) for any website is keyword research.

What is your target audience going to type in to a search engine? Remember, we are not just talking about single words but two, three and four word phrases. The longer the phrase, the more specific it is and the less competitive it will be to rank for.

Ranking highly for a longer keyword phrase will result in less traffic, but is likely to lead to more conversions, so go after those long, specific search terms. Provided, of course, that they are relevant to your site!

Try the free Digital Point Solutions keyword suggestion tool: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. This tool accesses the two main providers of search data, Wordtracker and Overture.

You need to find keywords that are not only going to send lots of traffic to your website, but also traffic that is going to convert into sales and clients, traffic relevant to what your site offers.

Step 2 Incorporating Keywords into Your Web Pages

Search engines analyse all the text on a web page, but the text in some parts of a page are more important than others, such as the titles. This is pretty obvious really since a title should neatly summarize what a page is about.

So, once you have the right keywords, they need to be added to the right places within your pages. This is ‘on-site’ or ‘on-page’ search engine optimisation.

Some of the most important parts of a page where keywords should be are:

• The title meta tag.
• The description meta tag.
• The H1 tag.
• The content on the page.
• The anchor text of internal links.
• The filenames of pages.
• The filenames of images.

Step 3 Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission used to be a very important part of SEO, but since links between websites became an important factor in the ranking of sites, and the main way search engines find new sites, submitting to search engines is not really essential.

That said, there are many more search engines, portals and directories other than the big three (Google, MS Live and Yahoo), so an automatic submission tool can be a big help. Do a search for ‘search engine submission tools’ for a selection.

You should be able to find a free tool that does the job well, don’t pay silly money for submission services – it is not worth it any more.

Step 4 Build Links

Increasing the number of links to a website is the most important part of SEO. Search engines interpret a link from another website as a ‘vote’ for a site, so the more links you can get to your website, the better.

Quality is just as important as the quantity of links. A link from a page or, even better, a whole site about the same subject as yours carries more weight.

The text of the links pointing to a site (the anchor text) is also important. If the anchor text includes your targeted keywords, the link is an even better ‘vote’ for your site.

A few of the main ways you can get links to your site are:

• Submitting your site to web directories.
• Exchanging links with other websites with similar or related content (reciprocal linking).
• Writing and submitting articles.

The best (and cheapest) way to get links to your site is to create great content that other sites will want to link to.

Step 5 Monitor Rankings and Visitors

During the process of optimising a website, it is important to check how well a site is ranking in the search engines and how many visitors it is receiving.

The easiest way to check a site’s rankings is to use an online tool or specialised SEO software to automatically check many keywords and phrases on several different search engines at the same time. It can also be useful to check your competitors rankings.

Checking once every couple of weeks should give you a good picture of how well your site is doing and show you the effects of your SEO efforts over time.

To see how many visitors have found your site and the search phrases they have used, check your website traffic statistics. This will help you see if you are targeting the right keywords.

These are the basic steps involved in optimising a site so it will rank in the search engines, but Search Engine Optimisation  is an ongoing process. You need to continue to build links to your site, add new content and monitor your own, and you competitors rankings.

Submitting to directories is not the surefire way to high PageRank and rankings that it used to be, but submitting your site to strong paid directories is still a great way to obtain one-way links, increase PageRank and can even generate traffic as well.

But how do you decide which ones to spend money on?

There are a number of factors to consider such as PageRank, Page Strength and number of back links. Several lists have been published that compare these factors, such as the strongest directories list at Aviva Directory and the web directory list at Linksjuice. The Vilesilencer directory list is another great resource for directories.

However, these lists tend to concentrate on the home page of the directory. It is important that you consider the quality of the specific page a site is to be listed on when spending your limited marketing budget.

1. What is the PageRank, Page Strength and number of backlinks for the specific page?
2. Are there many outgoing links on the page? Direct links out from the page will dilute the PageRank and lessen the strength of the link to your site, but this needs to be balanced with ….
3. How relevant are the other listings and links on the page? Relevant outgoing links make the page authoritative and increase the value of the link to your site. (Lots of irrelevant site-wide links are not good.)
4. Does it include relevant keywords in the URL, page meta-title and on page title (H1 tag)?

Finally, consider the additional links offered by some directories. The facility to add links to pages within your site is a valuable extra feature.

An important point to note is that by adding your site to a directory page where competitors are listed will help negate the effect of the link to their sites (although how long the link has been there is also a factor). Buying a featured listing that lists your site above your competitors could make your site look more important to the search engines.

Here are a few of the strongest, high PageRank directories:

• Best of the Web – Expensive, but one of the oldest and well-established directories after dmoz.org and Yahoo directory.
• Aviva Directory – A quality PageRank 6 directory offering yearly featured and regular listings.
• UncoverTheNet – A directory and web portal, which offers a lot more content than a standard directory.
• V7N Directory – The directory of the V7N web development community.