Note:  I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  There are a lot of changes going on at SEM Basics (one’s that I think you’ll appreciate).  When things settle down I should be able to start posting more frequently.  In the meantime, here’s a blog post that I started a few weeks ago.  I just quickly “finished” it so that I could post it to the site.  You should find it helpful.

I’ve started to take a closer look at the list of directories that I mentioned in my previous post.  Here are my initial findings:

• SEO Kit list of Powerful Directories — it seems to me that this directory is out of date (for instance, included in their list is the Zeal directory, which has been defunct for a while).  As such, I have chosen to ignore this list.
• The Strongest Links — I’m not sure how useful this list is.  That is to say, I don’t see what information this list provides that I can’t find elsewhere!  The only information on this list which looks interesting is something called “saturation”.  However, as far as I can tell the site doesn’t explain what saturation means.  Therefore, given that there are other, quality list of directories out there, I’ve decided to leave this list off of the short list.
• List of Strongest Directories according to SEOMoz’s Page Strength tool — Very clever and, it seems, very useful.  The idea of this list is to check “the page strength of all the paid directories listed in Bob Mutch’s comprehensive listing and then ranked them in order of page strength.”  What’s more, he eventually added more paid directories.  This is a great resource as it can help prioritize the order and importance of paid directories.  This is certainly a resource that I will have to come back to and look at more in depth. 
• Quanta’s List of the Cream of the Top Free Web Directories — Quanta’s list seems more useful for their niche directories than for anything else.  While they claim to have a list of the “cream of the crop” directories, I didn’t find any information which explained how it is that they know this.  Therefore, I have no reason to assume anything about these directories one way or the other.  On the other hand, while I don’t know the quality of the niche directories, I do admire the quantity of niche directories listed.  At the same time, no particular niche is so large that the individual directories within it can’t be checked out on a need-to-know basis.  Given that for now I am only concentrating on general directories, Quanta doesn’t make the short list.  However, I’ve noted them for that time when I do look into lists of niche directories.
• AddUrl.nu’s list of free SEO friendly web directories - Here is a list on par with Info Vilesilencer’s list.  Indeed, Jim Westergren (the author of this list) has a partnership with Dan at Info Vilesilencer and they “help each with data collection to maintain their lists”.  As with Info Vilesiencer’s list, the directories on addurl are SEO friendly directories.  Also, I’ve checked out Jim’s website from time to time and if you take a look around you’ll notice that he knows a thing or two about SEO.  In other words, if Jim says that these directories are SEO friendly then I trust that they are SEO friendly.  What’s more, there are a HUGE number of directories on this list (almost 1000).  What’s more they are all free!  This list certainly makes the short list.
• Top Directories - It doesn’t seem to me that this list adds much of value to the other lists.  As such, it doesn’t make the short list.
• Best Web Directories - This site looks like it could have a lot of useful information.  In particular, I like their ranking criteria.  I’m keeping it on the short list until future evaluation (although I imagine that it will stay on the list).
• Paid Directory List - Doesn’t offer anything than than Aviva’s strongest directories list.  As such, it doesn’t make the short list.
• Directory Critic   - I’m not sure whether or not to include this list on the short list.  They claim to update the list on a daily basis; however, I did notice a discrepancy between the PR ranking of Ezine Articles according to the Google Toolbar and their PR ranking according to Directory Critic (according to the Google Toolbar they have a PR of 6, according to Directory Critic they have a PR of 4.  This makes me wonder about how well they maintain their list. 
• SEO Company’s list of web directories -  Looks interesting, but doesn’t seem to be up-to-date. 

Well, that’s about it for now.  Enjoy!

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How To Get .edu and .gov Links

As we mentioned in our The Value of an .edu and .gov link Tutorial, .edu and .gov links seem to be highly valued incoming links (either because Google tends to favor them or because they naturally tend to be high quality incoming links).  As such, it is worth asking what one can do to attract such links.  Below are some useful strategies.

Getting .edu Links

1. Go after the high quality .edu links
   Not all .edu links are created the same.  For instance, links from a students homepage or an online newspaper aren’t considered as valuable as are links from a professor’s home page or (even better) the university library site, since it is usually easier to get links from students pages than it is from the university library web site. To quote Eric Wald: "give me 10 library links instead of 100 student page links any day."  This doesn’t mean that there is no value in getting links from students pages, just that your main focus should be on the higher quality .edu links. 
    
2. Offer your services
   If you have services that can benefit a school, offer them for free or at a discounted rate in exchange for a link.  Some possible ideas include offering website design or marketing services, discounts on gardening services, free financial advice, etc.  Alternatively, you could offer a special class, host a event, or give some guest lectures.  The key is to think creatively about what value you can offer the school.  If you do you will most likely find yourself with some quality .edu links.
    
3. Promote your services
   If you provide services that benefit the school and/or their students then see if you can get the school to link to your service.  For instance, if you run a local hotel/motel ask the school to link to your site as a possible source of lodging for people visiting the school from out of town. 
    
4. Review a schools online programs
   If a school offers any sort of online programming and/or services consider reviewing those programs or services and them asking for a link to your review.
    
5. Use your knowledge
   Here is a particularly clever idea (found on the SEOMoz.org blog): "Write an article about a Chapter or Topic in a popular college course, then notify professors about it…Don’t do this unless you have fantastic knowledge and writing ability on the topic - or hire a second prof to write the article for you. Profs are extra picky about what they link to.  Don’t bug them for a link unless you have best on the web calibre content."  Note, though, that "most of these links are now inside of course management systems such as BlackBoard and WebCT.  These do not get spidered and pass no juice".  The advantage of these links lies in the fact that they "deliver short bursts of traffic each semester that the course is taught".  And if that particular professors web page ranks well in the search engine you can actually expect a good deal of traffic from that link. 
    
6. Donate money
   If you or your business donate money to a particular school and they list your donation on your site ask if they would be willing to include your URL along with your name.
    
7. Participate in forums with the .edu extenstion
   Check to see if there is an .edu online forum related to your industry and, if so, participate in that forum.  Often times you will be able to add a "signature" to your posts which contains a link to your website.  Also, from time to time you may be able to link to your site in a post if your site provides relevant information to a conversation taking place on the forum.  A good way to find these forums is to do a search online.  Simply search for your keyword plus the phrase "forum site:.edu".  For instance, if you wanted to find .edu forums relating to art you would do the following search:  art forum site:.edu.  It doesn’t hurt, of course, to check the link popularity of the forum before investing time and effort into it. 
    
8. Participate in blogs with the .edu extension
   Like forums, blog participation is often times a good way to get incoming links.  Simply post relevant comments to the blog.  Often times this will automatically include a link to your site.  Furthermore, if you have some content that you feel relates to the blog post feel free to add a link to the appropriate page in the comments section.  Like .edu forums, you can find .edu blogs by searching online for your keyword plus the phrase "blog site:.edu".  For instance, to find art related blogs search for "art blog site:.edu".
    

Getting .gov Links

1. Provide Good Press
   Here is yet another clever idea from the SEOMoz Blog:  "Government agency heads like positive press as much as anyone…  When I have a positive message about a specific agency I always send a quick email to their webmaster and to the agency head. This email contains the URL of my review and a positive note about their work…  So, next time you see some nice info on a .gov site or in a .gov publication that matches the theme of
   your website, think about writing a review and letting them know that you appreciate their work."
    
2. Donate to Government sponsored charities
   Who knows, perhaps the government agency that sponsors the charity will link to you.
    
3. Participate in blogs and forums with the .gov extension
   Same idea as participating in the .edu blogs and forums, except that you search for .gov blogs and forums instead.  For instance, to find art related forums search "art forum site:.gov".  To find art related blogs search for "art blog site:.gov".

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The Value of an .edu and .gov link

Many people in the world of SEO believe that Google places more weight on links from governemt and/or educational websites.  These are usually sites with .gov or .edu extensions, but not necessarily so (for instance, only higher education institutions have the .edu sites, the K - 12 sites usually have .us extensions).  The theory is that Google believes that links from these sites are harder to come by and are more likely to exist become the webmaster found value in the site that they are linking to. 

While strict proof that Google favors these sites is difficult to come by, there is a certain logic to it.  For starters, not just anyone can acquire an .edu or .gov domain extension, they are reserved for governmental sites and accredited educational institutions.  This means that it is harder for someone to manipulate links from these domains.  It makes sense that Google would favor links from domains that are harder to manipulate.  After all, one of the biggest problems that Google (and the other search engines) have to deal with is people who attempt to manipulate the search engine results by creating artificial linking schemes.   Furthermore, SEOBook feels that the representation of .edu and .gov sites in Google’s search engine results is "disproportionate".  There are other arguments, although none of them seem conclusive (just suggestive). 

Others, however, argue that the advantage of receiving a link from an .edu and .gov sites lies in the fact that they tend to be older sites with a unique set of high quality incoming links.  People tend to trust these sites and as such they are able to attract large numbers of high quality incoming links.  Indeed, Google’s Matt Cutts claims (at the end of this video) that Google’s algorithm does not favor .edu or .gov links, but rather that these sites tend to be the types of sites that rank well (i.e., old sites with high quality inbound links).  Others, however, are skeptical.  After all, Google is known to be less than forthcoming with other important data concerning their algorithm (such as information concerning incoming links into a site).  Why then should we trust what they have to say about .edu or .gov links?   

At the end of the day, though, this debate doesn’t seem to be of great importance.  Whether or not .edu and .gov links are valuable because Google favors them or because they are high quality links in and of themselves, there seems to be value in receiving links from educational and/or governmental sites.  As Eric Wald states "these are the most trustworthy links you could ever hope to obtain, and will remain so long after the search engines have spotted and disregarded your other links that aren’t."

So, it seems unanimous that one way or another it is worthwhile Getting .edu and .gov links.  The only question is how to get them.  For that you can see our Getting .EDU .GOV Links Tutorial. 

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Basic Keyword Analysis

If you have finished our How to build a Keyword List Tutorials you should have in front of you a large list of relevant, targeted keywords.  But, as you know, there is more to finding Valuable Keywords than having a list of relevant keywords.  There are three other factors that we have to take into consideration: the type of keyword, the popularity of a keyword, and it’s competition (as we mentioned in our Basic Keyword Strategy Tutorials).  As such, you now have to properly analyze your keyword list for all of these factors. Then, based on your analysis, you will want to prioritize your keywords. First and foremost, you will want to optimize your site for those keywords which you have a decent chance of ranking well (as we will explain below). As such, this tutorial will focus on how to determine the competitiveness of a keyword, and how to use that information to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your search optimization efforts.

A keyword by any other name is not as competitive
What makes a keyword easy or difficult to optimize for?  It all has to do with the quality of your competition.  You can have a million sites competing for a particular keyword, but if none of them have properly optimized their site it will not be difficult to outrank them.  On the other hand, if you go up against a thousand well optimized sites you may have a very difficult time ranking at all.  Therefore, if you can make your site the most relevant site in the eyes of the search engine for a particular keyword then your site should rank #1.  Now, what needs to be noted is that this is true for each and every keyword in your list.  After all, the search engines want to show the most relevant results for each and every unique search term. 

As such, in terms of analyzing your keyword list, your ultimate goal is to determine the quality of competition for each and every keyword.  Nonetheless, when working with large keyword lists it is not practical to analyze the quality of competition for each and every search phrase (given the limits of today’s keyword analysis tools, it is just not possible). As such, we are forced to analyze the quantity of sites that you are competing against for any given keyword and to then infer from this number the quality of your competition.  Later on, after you have analyzed your list as a whole, you can focus in on individual keywords and note the quality of the competition for that particular term or phrase.

Determining how many sites are you competing against
There is a rather easy way to get a sense of how many sites you are competing against.  It involves two of the advanced search features of Google - intitle and inanchor.  Intitle tells you how many sites have the keyword phrase in question in their header tag.  Inanchor tells you how many sites have incoming links which include the keyword phrase within the anchor text of at least one link.  Perhaps an example will help clarify what these search functions are and why they can be so helpful.

Let’s start with a normal online search, let’s say for golf balls.  A search for that term on Google shows that there are some 20,400,000 sites which contain the words golf and balls within the text of their page, as shown below:
 

 

While this may sound like a tremendous number of sites, as we shall see the vast majority of those sites are not optimized for the search engine and as such are not really competing for this term. 

Let’s take a look now at the number of sites which include the phrase "golf balls" in the title tag of their page:
 

 

Note that there are 276,000 sites which include this phrase in their header tag.  This is a much lower number than the number of sites which include the two words somewhere (not necessarily together) on their webpage.  Given that one of the most important steps in optimizing a website is to place relevant keywords in the title tag of one’s web pages (as we shall learn in our Web page optimization Tutorial), the number of sites that include the phrase in their title tag is a decent indication of the number of sites which are actively optimizing their sites for that particular keyword. 

Now let’s take a look at the number of sites which have an incoming link with the keyword phrase Golf Balls included in the anchor text of the link:
 

 

There are 148,000 sites which contain the phrase "Golf Balls" in an incoming link.  What this means is that each of these 148,000 sites have at least one incoming link with the phrase "golf balls" included in the anchor text.  This statistic does not show us the quality of those links nor how many there are per each site.  Still this figure is helpful in determining how many sites one is competing against for a given keyword.  After all, incoming links are one of the most important factors in determining search engine rankings and the anchor text of a link is one of the most important elements of a quality incoming link. 

Even more helpful, though, is combining the intitle and inanchor search function as follows:

 
 

Combining these two search functions let us know how many sites both contain the keyword phrase in the title tag and in the anchor text of at least one incoming link.  Given that ranking well is a function of the successful combination of Web page optimization and link building, this figure best indicates how many sites one is actually competing against.  From this figure we can then infer the quality of competition based on the assumption that if a lot of people are optimizing their site for a particular keyword then most likely some of them are doing it well. 

The following chart helps illustrate this last point:

Keyword phrase	Number of Competing Sites (based on intitle/inanchor analysis)	Number of backlinks for top rated site in Google
Golf	15,400,000	44,000
Golf balls	113,000	26,500
Used golf balls	656	1,270

As we can see there seems to be a somewhat direct correlation between the number of sites competing for a particular keyword and the number of backlinks for the top site listed in Google related to that keyword (although it should be pointed out that this is not always the case).  Of course, there are other factors besides link popularity to take into consideration when considering the quality of one’s competition (such as the quality of those links), but nonetheless it is an indication of the quality of competition. 

Organizing your keyword list
Based on the above, we recommend that you purchase Keyword Elite and get in the habit of analyzing your keyword lists using the intitle and inanchor features (Keyword Elite seems to be the only commercially available software program which allows you to analyze large lists of keywords using the intitle and inanchor search feature). 

Once you have done that, you can organize your keyword list according to the number of competing sites.  For instance, you can group together every keyword which has no competing sites (i.e., for which no other site includes the keyword in both  the title tag and the link text of at least one incoming link).  These keywords should be rather easy to rank well for as there seems to be almost no competition for them.  You can then group together all those keywords which have 1 - 10 sites competing against them, and then those keywords which have 10 - 100 sites competing against them, and so on. 

You can then look for the most popular, relevant keywords in your first group of keywords and optimize your site for those keyword phrases.  Once you have used up all the quality keywords in the first group you can then proceed to the next group, again optimizing your site for the most popular, relevant keywords within that group. 

This method ensures that you are always competing for those keywords which are the easiest for you to rank well for.  At the same time, it helps to build link momentum which will help you to compete later on for the more competitive keywords.  This is an extremely powerful way to maximize your optimization efforts.  It helps ensure that you rank for the maximum number of keywords possible with the least of amount of effort necessary! 

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