Submit Blog to Blog Directories - Traffic Exchange

How do you attract more readers and visitors to your Blog? To make your Blog more visible, the solution lies in submitting your Blog URL or RSS Feed to as many good Blog directories as possible. There are hundreds of websites touting themselves as blog search engines, blog directory hosts, feed aggregators, and traffic exchanges. A couple of the website creators are out to make a quick buck, selling their sites and member database on eBay the moment they attract sufficient traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I have submitted this Blog and RSS feed to many of these Blog directories for free. The first submissions were of course to Google and Yahoo; if you have not submitted your Blog URL to them, you may read the earlier articles on submitting sitemap to Google and submitting sitemap to Yahoo. At the same time, submit the Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


Although my blog is only about 2 months' old at the time of this writing, if I were to enter my blog title “candymoney” into Google search, I am able to see it appearing at the top of the search results. Many of the other results are those of the blog directories in which this blog was listed. Listing in directories therefore helps in promoting your blog.

Before you proceed to submit your site to these directories, my personal advice is that you create a free web-based email account solely for this purpose. Should the directory hosts decide to sell their sites and database in future, your present email account would not be compromised. This is also to prevent flooding of your personal email with updates sent to you by the many directory administrators.

The aim of this article is to relate to you my experience in those free blog directories that I have tried submitting to. While I appreciate comments on these, please refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. A number of them may be fly-by-nights and I will not recommend them unless I have personally used them. Others may have specific requirements such as blogs having to be older than 6 months, or blogs covering specific news contents.

Different directories have different forms to fill when submitting your blog. Their instructions are usually easy to follow. However, you may want to note the following:-

1. Some directories require you to register before adding your Blog. While most of them allow you to submit more than one Blog, some may require you to use a different login name for each Blog. What I did in these situations was to create different login names but using the same email address.

2. If you are asked for the RSS Feed or your Feed URL, check that under your Settings -> Site Feed, the “Allow Blog Feed” shows either “Full” or “Short.” Do not choose “None.” Your Feed URL is yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default or yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss where yourblogURL is the URL of your Blog beginning with http:// Do not type in “www” for Blogger blogs. For example, our Atom Feed URL is http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default You can test it by typing your feed address into a web browser and view. If you have an external Feed address like a Feedburner Feed address, you may submit that too. I shall go into the details of Feed and Feed directories in a separate article.

3. Where you are to create a picture, banner, or link button to represent your blog, you can use Google's Picasa or any image editing software to create a new picture, or resize a current one to the required dimensions. Normally, you are required to upload it onto a free image host or server and provide the URL of your banner or picture. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files.

4. The “Reciprocal Link URL” is the main page where you will be putting a link to their blog directory. More likely than not, this will be the URL of your Blog.

5. The “meta keywords” or “tags” are keywords that represent your blog's content. Similarly “meta description” is a short few sentences describing your blog. Basically, “meta” tags provide information about your Blog for search engines to identify and match.

As the directory list is long, the article will be split into several parts, and updated as and when I try out the sites. Some sites track the number of the visitors to your blog. You may see voting gateways, which basically give visitors a chance to vote for your blog if they wish to. If they do not want to vote, there is always an option for them to enter the site without voting. Have a look at the directory sites and submit your blog to those you like.

Traffic Exchange Sites

A number of traffic exchange sites have blog directories which can include links to your blog.

Blog Directories

Technorati

They supposedly track 75.2 million blogs. Quite naturally, you would want your blog to be one of them. Register with them and submit your blog. Follow their instructions to claim your blog. They will provide you with statistics like the number of blogs that link to you. You can also invite other members to favorite your blog.

Wikablog

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, this is the equivalent for blogs. It faces the same problems as Wikipedia i.e., while it is easy to list your blog, it is equally easy for others to edit your listing. Nevertheless, for a new blogger, this is one of the fastest way to have your blog appear in a directory. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Fuel My Blog

This is an interesting directory. Unlike the usual text-based blog directories, this site goes by images that you create to represent your blog. When your visitors click a link on your site that says Fuel My Blog!, your image will move up the ranks and appear on the front page, making it more visible to directory viewers.

Blogtoplist


A blog directory listing that is sorted by the number of unique visitors to your blog. Your visitors can also cast a Vote to increase your ranking. The scores are reset every week to allow new bloggers like us a chance to be placed among the top.



Topblogsites

Here, you are ranked by unique hits based on the Votes you receive from your visitors. Many of the comments posted on the directory site are spam comments, and if you can disable comments, you might want to do that. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Mybloggingarea

Another directory that ranks you based on the Votes and the number of unique visitors to your site.

Topblogarea


A blog directory that tracks unique visitors. Unlike the earlier ones, visitors do not vote at this directory.

Blogflare

This is a simple, nice blog directory that tracks your unique visitors and pageviews. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Topblogging




Here, you are ranked based on unique visitors. Although there is a count for votes in, somehow the code provided by them did not track this vote count.

Blogroll


I joined this directory only about a week ago. A simple directory that monitors the Votes and unique hits.

Worldtopblogs

Ranking is by the Votes cast by the visitors to your blog.

Topbloglists

There is a voting gateway for your visitors but ranking is based on unique pageviews.

This article continues at Submit Blog to Blog Directories (II).

For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

SEO Tools - Seach Engine Optimization

What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.

Search Engine Optimization

We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.

With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.

Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings

After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories and Search Engines are the internet Yellow Pages. Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.

Read these guides and follow the steps outlined:-

1. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

2. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!

3. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com

4. Submit Blog to Search Engines

5. Submit Blog to Blog Directories

6. Submit RSS Feeds and Pings

7. Blog Traffic Exchange

Free SEO Tools

After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.

To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.

Enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.

Enter your search termsSubmit search form


Suggested SEO Tools

Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:- (Copy the words and paste in google search box given below in this page.It will open in a new window)

a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.

b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.

c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.

d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.

e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.

f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.

g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.

h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.

i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.

j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.

k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.

l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.

m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.

Submit your Blog to Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.

While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.

Website Indexing

Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.

Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-

1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.

2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.

3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.

4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.

6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.

7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.

List of Search Engines

You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.Search these below words without links in google search box given below.

* Google
* Yahoo! Search
* Microsoft Live Search
* Alexa Web Search
* Baidu (Chinese search engine)
* ExactSeek
* SearchSight
* Scrub the Web
* EntireWeb
* Gigablast
* Exalead
* SearchKing
* whatUseek
* AnooX
* Splat Search
* Walhello
* SearchIt
* email Mozdex
* Jayde
* Infotiger
* Abacho (European search engine)
* Submit-one
* TowerSearch
* HotLaunch
* Shoula
* The-search-site
* Websquash
* Unasked
* eVisum (educational resource)
* DinoSearch
* SearchRamp
* SearchtheWeb
* SearchWarp
* Mixcat
* BestYellow
* Beamed


Website Submission Services

There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.
Type the following words in google search and enter into their website.Use the Seach box given below.
* FastSubmit
* Submit Express
* AddMe
* Freesubmissionweb
* ineedhits
* Submitshop
* Searchengineoptimising
* AddPro
* Pageranklist
* Freewebsubmission
* Amfibi
* Burf
* Jerkasmarknad
* LocalSubmit
* SrSubmit

Submit your Sitemap to MSN and ASK.COM

We had explained how to submit Blogger sitemaps to Google and Yahoo!. When the sitemap industry standard was first announced in 2006, Microsoft's MSN was one of the three major search providers which supported the protocol. Submitting your Blog's sitemap to these search engines will enable them to index the pages and contents of the site. Needless to say, having all the pages indexed will essentially avail your contents to more internet users and improve your site's page rank.

Blogger Sitemap

If you own an external domain site, you can search the net for sitemap generators which help you create a sitemap file. Upload the file onto the root directory and call it sitemap.xml. The full URL of the sitemap will then be something like this:- “http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml”

However, we cannot upload files onto the root directory of Blogger blogs. Hence, when asked to insert a Blogger blog sitemap, it will have to be either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml


OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml


Replace YOURBLOGNAME with the name of your blog. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. As an example, our blog's sitemap will be http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Submit Blog Sitemap to MSN

Unlike Google and Yahoo!, MSN does not have a set of procedures or an address where you can submit sitemaps to. In the latest post in their Microsoft Live Search Weblog, they had invited webmasters and developers to help build a New Webmaster Portal that would include sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, very much what Google and Yahoo! already had. Once MSN has that user interface, we shall update this article.

The MSN team had suggested that webmasters add this to their robots.txt file to have the MSN spiders crawl the sitemap file:-

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml


Again, we do not have root access to the Blogger server and this will not avail to us.

The alternative solution in the meantime is to submit the Blog sitemap to Moreover.com. It seemed that there was a standing arrangement for Moreover to provide the submitted feeds to MSN for crawling and indexing.

Whether or not the arrangement still holds true, there is really no harm in submitting your sitemap to Moreover.

Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml


If you have submitted it correctly, you should see this message:-

Thank you for your ping. The moreover database will be updated with the new data from your url - http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml as soon as possible.




Submit Blog Sitemap to Ask.com

Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves, is the next major internet search engine. The sites that it owns include Excite, Bloglines, MyWay and iWon. It is also a participant of the Sitemaps protocol program.

Submitting the sitemap to Ask is easy too. Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml


If you are successful, you should see this screen:-



(Tags: Sitemap,SEO,Search engine submission,ASK.com,MSN )

Submit your site to Yahoo Search Engine

Publicize your site by having your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site included in Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search. I went to the official Yahoo! submission of URL page and clicked the link “Submit Your Site for Free”. You will be prompted to log in using your Yahoo! account. For those of you who do not have a Yahoo! account, simply sign up for one. It is Free.

After you have your Yahoo! account, and are logged in, you will see this screen.





Select “Submit Site Feed” and enter the URL of your Blog's site feed. You can use either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml


OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml


Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once the Sitemaps are submitted, click the “Authentication” link shown at the top right hand corner of the page.





You will now have to authenticate your site ownership with Yahoo!, by either uploading a verification file to your site, or adding a META tag to your site. The authentication via a META tag was only introduced by Yahoo! recently, on Jan 30, 2007.

Note: Blogs created under Blogger.com or Blogspot.com cannot upload a verification file in the root directory. The first method is therefore NOT applicable to you.

The only way to authenticate your Blogger.com and Blogspot.com blogs with Yahoo! is to add a META tag. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the META Tag as follows:-

head

META Tag

b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/



Remember to replace the META Tag with the code generated by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Yahoo! Site Explorer, click the button that says “Ready to Authenticate” as shown below.

You will see a message that says “Your site is pending authentication.” Check back later, and you will notice that your site is now indexed and crawled by Yahoo!

According to the Yahoo Site Explorer instructions:-

“If you have added the META tag, please keep the tag in your site's home page. We will revalidate your site ownership by checking this META tag regularly.”

It is alright to leave this meta tag as well as the Google sitemap meta tag in your template.


(Tag: SEO, Search Engine Submission,Page Rank,Index)

Submit your site to google webmaster

Submitting your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site to Google Webmaster will enable Google to find, index, and rank your site. For those who are new to this, you may go to the official Google Webmaster Tools site to create a new Webmaster profile.

Upon logging in using your Gmail account, key in your blog site URL, and click OK. You will then be asked to verify your site. This is to ascertain that you are indeed the owner of the site.

There are two ways to verify your site. You can either add a Meta Tag or Upload an HTML file. If you are using the Meta Tag method, Google will generate a Meta Tag code. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the Meta Tag as follows:-(add meta tag alone .The head and b:inclu already available.)

head

META TAG

b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/



Replace the META TAG with the code generated by Google Webmaster. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Google Webmaster site, you can click the button that says “Verify”.

Note: The second method of uploading an HTML file is NOT applicable to Bloggers using Blogger.com or Blogspot.com because this requires you to upload a file to the root directory of your Blog, which is not possible. There is therefore only one method for you to verify your site, and that is by inserting the Meta Tag as explained above.

After you have had your site verified, click on the Sitemaps tab as shown below. By adding a Sitemap, you will be providing Google with more details and information about your Blog. With this, Google will crawl your site, report information on any errors in the Sitemaps tab, and index your Blog site at a faster rate.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

Click the link that says “Add a Sitemap”. This will take you to another screen where you should choose the type “Add General Web Sitemap”. The Sitemap URL for any normal website is usually the index page that is stored in the highest-level directory of that site. In the case of Blogger.com or Blogspot.com, the only way to add a Sitemap is to use either of the following 2 Sitemaps:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml


OR

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml


Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once you have added your Sitemaps, you will receive a confirmation telling you that reports are being generated but “may take several hours to update”. Congratulations! You have successfully added your Sitemaps. When you login to your Google Webmaster days later, you should be able to see the indexed pages and statistics of Google webcrawl of your Blog.

Leave the meta tag in the template if you want to view the statistics of your site. If Google can't find the meta tag, it will show an error message in your webmaster toolbox and you may have to verify your site again.