Tackle It “Tool” Tuesday ~ Take today to tackle using a tool to increase your reach of your business.  You choose – Social Media, email marketing, website tools – something you can start today that will help increase not only visibility & traffic to your website but in the long run your database and revenue.

Let’s Talk Traffic…Increase it with submitting your site to directories…

Submit Your Website!

Everyone knows the biggest website challenge is to increase the traffic to your site which in turns increases your search engine ratings which in turn increases your visibility viral and should increase your conversion ratings. Your conversion ratings will still depend on your content and copy but most of the battle is getting the masses to find you.

The best way to increase your website traffic is to submit your website to the different search engine directories requesting that they index your website.  The different search engine directories ask that you manually submit your website for indexing to help maintain and control the spam levels they are hit with.  Manually submitting your website does not guarantee the search engine will pick it up and index your site on the first submission but they do prefer you use this method.

Submitting your website to the directories is easy but can be time consuming with visiting them and then monitoring to see if you have been “indexed”.  BUT it is easy and if you have a website it is a must!  Below is a list of the top directories you should start with:

Google – Google is the largest search directory. They have made it very easy to submit your website –  Submit to Google  (type in your url and a message they ask you to and submit)

Yahoo! – Yahoo is still very strong and has millions of users – It is very easy to submit your site here as well – Submit to Yahoo!

Bing – The New MSN directory is strong and you should submit your site here too – They have made their submission process easy as well – Submit to BING

The website I used to find directories to submit my websites to is Free Web Submission – there is a list of 50 directories you can submit your URL to.  I hand chose the ones I wanted to use based on their Google Ranking and their Alexa rankings – you can see the information right on this site.  Though submitting this way, manually, has taken several hours and I am not done yet, it was a great way to start at least with the top directories.

A Tool to help with submitting your site!

This is a tool I was introduced to by a good friend of mine and top internet marketer – Traffic Bug takes on the heavy lifting of submitting your website to hundreds of directories once you have filled in the needed website information.  They give you an 11 day free trial and start working immediately once you have given all of the requested information.

The best way to use Traffic Bug for your submitting is to be sure you have all of your website info at a hands reach so you can fill it all out the day you sign up and you do not miss one day of the free trial working for you.  They have perfected the balance of submitting so you are looked at negatively for using a program for submitting and they protect their users from spam sent from directories.

A key tip – set up a free email address a head of time too – each search engine you submit to requests a verification – this way your regular inbox does not get slammed with these emails. Just be sure to be checking it daily so you can verify those requests and again you do not waste one day of the free trial.

I recommend using Traffic Bug and get your website submitted to the different directories, social media bookmarks, rss direcotries, search engines – but at the very  least manually submit your site to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

There is a tool you can check your indexing and submission levels it is called SEO Quake, it is a firefox plug-in – once you have set it up then when you open a website you can see the Google rank, Pages indexed to Google, Yahoo and the Alexa ranking as well..  If you want to turn it off you can click the little icon in the lower right corner of your webpage so it does not interfere with other things you are doing like writing your blog (some times the rankings would appear in my individual posting area so I had to turn it off when I was doing that).

Have Fun and Start Submitting Your Website Today!