Search Optimization School

When you’re building backlinks – sometimes people forget that directory submissions are pretty much the best kind you can get! As they age they get even more valuable as the pageranks rise, and despite the fact that the higher pagerank directories charge a pretty penny for listings – you can still get listed for free in all kinds of free directories, many of which only require a reciprocal link back. Blog commenting is something you have to do constantly, but with a directory you only have to submit your site one time to get in!

Here’s 5 free directories to get you started:

Surf Safely: Pagerank 4 directory accepting free submissions, but you must have a PICS label and family safe.

Flookie: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy to submit to.

Resource Help: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions for reciprocal link back.

Zoomdir: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, but if you do reciprocal link you’ll get listed in just days (vs. months with no link back).

Zico Sur: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy submit.

If you want to know even more about directory submission (including where to find 500+ high pagerank directories), read my more in depth post High Pagerank Directories for Quality Backlinks.

Firefox SEO extensions can help you dramatically if you do SEO on a regular basis. For years many of us have been manually doing research by hand for the details we can gather on competing sites in SERP’s. You go to yahoo to check backlinks, you check indexed pages in google, you check Alexa ranking, you check domain age. You might even snoop around to see if the site has a sitemap or robots.txt file. It’s a time consuming ordeal – isn’t it?

Believe it or not, there’s a free extension for firefox that can do all these thing and more! It’s called “SEO Quake”. Once you install it, it has 2 “modes”. One is “toolbar” mode, and it can display all the SEO attributes about a site in a toolbar at the top of Firefox. The other is a “SERP” mode, where it can append the google results and tell you all the SEO attributes of search results as you research your competitors like this:

See how it appends each search result with pagerank, backlinks, alexa ranking, etc? You just have to be careful when you setup this plugin to have it get results “on demand” (only when you tell it to), or you can get your IP banned from search engines for too many lookups.

If you don’t want something that heavy duty, I’ll give an honorable mention to the SEO Firefox extension Search Status. It puts a very simple tool in the status bar of firefox which shows the pagerank and alexa rankings of sites you browse. This is very handy as well.

What Firefox SEO extensions do you use?