Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

I was quite busy in the last months with some technical problems and did not have the chance to write.

Now, I am writing to ask you, the bloggers to review some of our websites: OneLoveNet.com Free Dating Website, European Business Marketplace & Directory or Middle East Business Portal. Write a short review with 1-2 links about any of these sites in your blog and we will reward you with a free link on our high quality business links directory, TradeHolding.org. If you added a review to your blog, just post here and I will add your link.

Some of the most important factors when ranking a page or website on a specific keyword is (1) the number of external incoming links to the page, (2) the quality and relevance of the page linking to your site and (3) the anchor text. The more quality and relevant sites link to you the better your ranking for your website and page.

Obviously big business directories and b2b portals like TradeHolding.com B2B Network have thousands of incoming links from other quality websites including trade associations, business magazines, government pages, region specific portals, etc. It was / is our job to drive targeted business traffic to our B2B network and implicitly advertise your company, products and offers. We spent years and a lot of money to advertise our network and reach an everyday growing business audience, currently our network is visited every day by about 12,000 business owners, decision makers, sellers and buyers. Obviously, a simple company presentation website with only 4-5 pages can never dream about a similar traffic, unless your company is a well known brand like Microsoft, BMW or Nokia, but you can actually increase your search engine rankings. Most company presentation websites receive less than 5-10 unique visitors / day but with a well prepared SEO campaign you can actually increase this to a few hundred targeted visitors / day. And, if you can convert just 1-2% of your traffic into customers, this would mean an additional 2-5 sales / day! Can you afford to send these customers to competition?

TradeHolding.com B2B Network has an integrated directory on all of our partner sites, these directories contain links to relevant websites on a categorized environment:

• Middle East Websites
• European Websites
• African Websites
• Business Websites

You can add a link to your website from these site sections since 2005 and clever webmaster already used this option to link to their websites. Until now, this was the only section on our websites where we allowed external links to be placed to our network, these pages actually contain only external links to other websites.

Since March 2007, we are testing a new option on 2 partner sites: TradeBoss.com and Middle East Business Directory. We have embedded a link box to the top right corner of company classification pages, these boxes can be rented by companies including a link to their company website. Getting links to your website from these pages obviously have a higher value than the above websites section because these have no outgoing links and the page strength is not divided to many different websites.

How does this work? Imagine that you have a website / page where you are trying to sell crude oil in large qantities. You browse to the relevant category(ies) on Middle East B2B Marketplace: Chemical Companies and / or Crude Oil Companies, click on Add Your Link Here on the top right corner, set the desired anchor text (it should be similar to the page title you are trying to advertise, for example: “ABC Company sells Crude Oil” or “Crude Oil for sale”), page description, personal details, pay for the link and you are ready. The more links to add using similar anchor texts, the better your chances that you will be ranked for that specific term.

Additionally, in 2006, we also launched TradeHolding.org, the Business Links Directory, where you can get free links to your business website.

So, remember: try to concentrate on getting many relevan links to your business website from various relevant sources. This is definitely a must if you intend to be ranked by search engines.

On 11 February I posted in my blog an article: Dating Site With Foto Models. Today,  when I checked my blog stats, I found that I get some traffic through google for the search term: “fotomodels”. I quickly went to google and typed the term: “fotomodels”. I thought that my site will show up somewhere on page 5-10, but no, my post is on the 1st page, the 10th position!

Can you believe this? Just search on google, you’ll see what I mean… Frankly, I have no idea how do I rank for this search term, my post was about fake profiles on dating sites with… fotomodel pictures, but it looks like, I wrote something very interesting. Although, this post was not advertised anywhere (just a few diggs), it looks like this was enough to be listed on page one for a one word term like fotomodels… Thanks Google!

Let’s see where will I rank with this new post, this time… about … fotomodels.

So, you probably know that there are hundreds and thousands of web directories and submitting your website to the right directories will help a lot your SEO. Unfortunately, there are many dead directories that are still live but apparently does not accept new websites. All they want is your backlink or they are not updated any more. I find it extremely bothering when I do not even receive a reject email for a directory submission.

So, I decided that I compile my blacklist of directories, again these directories might have a PR, but you do not get anything if you submit your site(s)…

Here are a few:

• Sphericom
• Oast
• Domaining.in
• Zorkk
• DotRig.com
• Submission4U

I have tried to add links to these directories and although placed a reciprocal link on the submitted sites, never heard from them after submission. More links will come later. If you know about web directories that seem to be dead or have some really bad practices (no response, not even a rejection email), please share it here.

And yes… I have not mentioned DMOZ in the list. We all know the story of DMOZ.

There is another bad practice: your listing is accepted but after a week or month your link can not be found. Here is an example: KingBloom.com.

If you see your directory above and have something to comment, you are also welcome.

There is an interesting article in WebMasterWorld about AdSense predictions for 2007. I will try to summarize what I like the most and whether I think it will happen or not:

• Google’s overall revenues will either stay the same as 2006, or rise slightly. True
• Marginal quality sites will become less and less profitable. True
• Continuing trend from 2006, advertiser behavior will continue to change pushing DOWN ad prices, but overall ad expenditures will increase. True
• Google will not allow any third-party audit of their click-fraud rate in 2007. Unless they will be forced to do so
• 2007 will see the first documented case of click-fraud blackmail. The same lightweight criminals in poorly policed countries that currently collect blackmail from mid-sized companies by threatening DDOS attacks will realize that they can get the same effect much, much easier by threatening to get AdSense publishers banned. The ransom note will go something like this: “On Thanksgiving Day, you will see hits on your home page from over 5,000 unique IP addresses that contain the unique URL of www.yerdomain.com/#payup-or-else. You will wire $2,000 to the following bank account by Dec. 15th, or else we will use 5,000 other unique IP addresses to click-fraud your account during the second half of December. Google will then freeze your Christmas profits and then ban you. If they don’t ban you, they will still keep your funds. In any case, we will attack again until Google does ban you.” Interesting, however, I think that google have the power to distinguish these clicks.
• The total number of AdSense publishers will continue to swell, which means the average AdSense payout will continue to drop. By the end of 2007, the average monthly AdSense publisher payout will be under $10 (it’s probably well under $25 already). Another good one, so actually there will be more millionaires and more and more publishers who’s only aim will be to pay the hosting fees from AdSense revenues…
• More and more money is put into internet advertising. Hmm… most probably true
• Spam and black hat stuff though will also escalate. Unfortunately most probably true…
• Webmasters will continue to whine for solutions that require Google get into the human intervention business. Google will continue to ignore all such suggestions. They will need to make changes. I guess currently their technology - human intervention ratio is about 80-20%, in my opinion, in 2007 this will go toward a 70-30% or even 65-35%. You can resolve a lot with IT but not everything.

If you want to read more, go to WebMasterWorld and read this post.

Just checked with iWebTool Page Rank Prediction, our newly launched business links directory: TradeHolding.org.

Right now, TradeHolding.org PR is still 0, but for a new domain name, this is not news at all.

By using this tool, we can actually measure how good or bad is what we do on Link Building. Webmasters should periodically check the PageRank Prediction to get an idea of the effectiveness of their link building.

It looks like we are doing our job quite well because, PR Prediction shows that we’ll have a PR4 on next google update. I am satisfied with this.

It looks like Link Building is becoming the key factor for a successful Search Engine Marketing. The more websites link to you, the higher your chances of being found and indexed by search engines.

Some, must read articles and comments if you prepare a Link Building Campaign:

Link Building Guide

Link Bait

5 Facts on Link Building

As a company or company website owner, your best bet is to gradually build links to your website (1-2 incoming links every day from business directories will do the job if you have a new website), but do not expect miracles in one week! Link Building is a long process and could take months before you see the effects.