Welcome to Week 4 of 7 Weeks to Success. By now you should successfully have web hosting with a Wordpress blog that has at least five articles. You should also have some pages such as “About”, “Contact”, etc. This week we will be discussing the importance of submitting to directories along with pinging services. Before I do this, let me explain the importance of web directories and pinging.

Web directories are very similar to search engines. They can be used to search for sites within certain categories. You’d think most people would just use search engines, which is true. However, when you have your site listed in web directories you get a free backlink + any anchor text you used. It’s very important that you use your main keywords when submitting to web directories. I’ll cover that later on in the post.

As I said in previous weeks, search engines LOVE sites that are constantly updated, and a quick and easy way to get your fresh content listed in search engines is through pinging services. When you update your site with a new article, your article will be “pinged” to tons of ping sites such IceRocket, BlogDigger, and more. This can help you receive traffic along with getting your new content listed in search engines.

So let’s first get started on web directories. When submitting to web directories, they will ask you for a site title. It’s very important that you use a highly searched term that is related to your site when you submit to web directories. This is strictly for SEO purposes and will help you receive search engine traffic.

To help you pick your keyword, I will use Dave’s site from RetiredPay (hope you don’t mind, free traffic). His niche site is about K1 Visa’s. Now let’s head over to our free keyword tracker and punch in k1 visa. The first search term, depending on your niche, would be very hard to beat, so I’d personally take the first two or three keywords. Currently, Dave’s title for his niche site is “File that K1 Visa NOW! | Don’t Waste Time | EasyK1″. If I was Dave, I would switch it up to “K1 Visa | K1 Visa Help | Procedures for K1 Visa”. This emphasizes the “k1 Visa” keyword, along with some longtail keywords. I will use David’s site later on in this post for an example.

Unfortunately, when you submit to web directories, you have long and lengthy forms that require a site title, site description, URL, email, name, etc. Typing these out, or even copy and pasting can be long and tedious work. No fear, Roboform is here. This program will automatically fill out everything a web directory wants with the click of a button! It’s saved at least 40 hours of my time through all the websites I own. The program is free, but there are limitations on how much information it will save. It only costs $30.00 to buy the PRO version, and trust me, it’s the best investment you’ll ever make.

Alright, let’s get started by setting up Roboform. Once you have it installed, you should see the Roboform icon in your toolbar. Right click it and go to “Identities” and then “New”. Name the identity whatever you’d like, but I usually use the name of my site to avoid confusion. Now it should open up a new window with your identity name. Go to the “Custom” tab and follow this guide (courtesy Superaff):

Field Name: url
Field Value: http://www.YourDomain.com
Other Match Strings: website

Field Name: title
Field Value: Site Title
Other Match Strings: your site name

Field Name description
Field Value: Type a description that has keywords, but not too spammy.
Other Match Strings: short desc (press enter) text (press enter) a short description of your website
*When you have more than one string you want Roboform to catch, you need to seperate them with by pressing enter

Field Name: the url of your reciprocal link
Field Value: leave blank
Other Match Strings: reciprocal link

Field Name: keywords
Field Value: put, in, your, keywords, seperated, by, comma
Other Match Strings: leave blank

Field Name: email
Field Value: youremail@adresshere.com
Other Match Strings: leave blank

*make sure to save all your card

Once you’ve got your identity set up, you can start submitting to web directories. Here’s a good list of free web directories. Start from the PR 6 and work your way down. Again, try to use good keywords in your title tag. For example, if Dave used “K1 Visa Help” as the site title when submitting to web directories, he would most likely rank in the top 5 positions on Google or other search engines.

Now let’s get this pinging down. Go to your Wordpress admin panel, then click “Options”. Inside there, click “Writing” and scroll down to “Update Services”. Now click here and copy and paste that list right under “Update Services”. Now just save your new settings by clicking “Update Options”. That’s all you have to do now. Never have to worry about

That concludes this week. If you ever have any questions about any week, including this one, feel free to contact me.

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