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Web directories have fallen out of favor with the SEO industry because so many of them are constructed as made-for-advertising sites. I don’t see as many directories style themselves as “SEO friendly” as a couple of years ago but there are still hundreds, perhaps thousands of cheap off-the-shelf directory sites that get spammed to death.

A typical in-house SEO or freelance specialist probably cannot justify the work of promoting several small directories but many agencies with 100 or more clients may be able to justify investing about 6 months in building up a small stable of trusted Web directories where they can get client Websites listed quickly.

Here’s the catch: You have to work with niche directories that are not being abused by the rest of the SEO industry.

So how does an SEO agency find the right kinds of directories? Some agencies just build their own small general purpose directories. Some agencies rely on professional or business organization directories (hubs from chamber of commerce sites, city and county business directories, etc.).

That’s not what I’m proposing. What I’m proposing is that you pick 5-10 small directories, take them under your wing, help populate them (with both your own clients and similar but uncompetitive sites), and help promote them.

I’m talking about doing some pro bono work (or, if you can get the directories to sign up as clients, then get them as clients).

Web directories don’t have to be relegated to the slag heap of yesterday’s SEO spam. You can turn them into meaningful resources as long as you can maintain engagement with the directory operator.

Your objective is not to create the next Yahoo! or DMOZ. Your objective is to foster a relationship with a Website that provides a source of reliable linking. One site won’t help much but 5-10 sites can do wonders for a new, small Website or network that needs some link support.

Web directories can and do send traffic to listed sites when they look like they are being maintained. That’s the other catch to this proposal: you can’t build up a directory with a “build it and they will come forever” attitude. You need to make sure the directories you support are going to keep working over the years.

And then help promote them with blog articles, free articles, press releases, and links from other, trusted directories. You don’t have to pay all the fees if the directory owners are willing to buy the quality listings.

A good directory listing will engage with people through social media, too. And now that I’ve written that you know all the spammers are going to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts so that their new listings are pushed out to hordes of content-scraping robots.

It really takes less effort than you think to create a viable Web directory. It just needs to establish itself through sound marketing practice in order to build up traffic and search engine trust. And when you have that reliable group of 5-10 directories that you personally know and trust, your initial round of link-building can get results quickly.

You don’t want or need to submit a Website to 100 or 1500 worthless directories. What you do want and need is to be able to get a Website into all the major search engines quickly. It’s easier to add a target listing to a good directory than it is to go through all that link-begging that most SEOs still engage in.

And speaking of SEOs, there is one more key aspect to this kind of optimization strategy: Under no circumstances should you EVER disclose your list of closely trusted directories to the rest of the SEO community. Let them go out and build their own resources. Protect your hard work.

There are some Websites where you can register, answer several questions about yourself, and self-publish an interview. You supposedly get some visibility and links. I actually considered setting up such a site many years ago. In fact, I set up a prototype and tested it with a group of authors.

In the end I decided not to do the site because I felt it would require too much oversight. Some people just do not behave rationally when it comes to promoting themselves and their Websites. They draw no boundaries. They respect no boundaries set by other people.

There are two popular “white hat” SEO techniques that people are using to build or attract more links for their Websites: article swaps and interviews.

Article swaps are the new form of reciprocal linking. Because the links are embedded in relevant content, the thinking goes, they will be deemed more acceptable by the search engines. Of course, instead of writing articles themselves, hard-core site promoters hire freelance writers to pump out dozens of articles every week.

Through the years I have often noted that the only real difference between many types of Web spam and legitimate content is excess. Too much of a good thing spoils it.

I expect article swapping to eventually be added to the search engines’ growing list of things not to do. There are just too many people doing it now for the brazen and sole purpose of building link popularity. And most of the articles aren’t even well-written. They are mechanical rehashes of the same basic points that earlier articles already covered.

Interviews have not caught on as wildly as article swaps, perhaps because people feel they should only be interviewing “noteworthy” people. Maybe you cannot find many celebrities in your industry, but if you interview all five of them you’ll have given your readers something new and different…maybe.

As I noted on SEO Theory today, Websites can turn out canned interviews in volume and I just don’t believe that is the kind of content we should advise our clients to create.

Most business sites could, in fact, turn out some pretty good interview articles. All they have to do is publish some case studies of how their customers use products and services. An interview doesn’t have to be conducted with someone famous. CNN often publishes micro-interviews with “people on the street” (or the Web). Other news sites do this, too.

You could also interview engineers or designers who have had an impact on your industry, or marketers, or other thought leaders who may not be famous but whom you personally sincerely feel deserve some recognition. There is nothing wrong with bringing your friends from college into your Web marketing if they can offer your visitors a valuable reading experience.

The SEO community sometimes goes in for interviews but more often it goes in for “guest blogging”. So far as I know the best SEO blogs that open up to guest blogs are NOT engaging in article swaps. They are legitimately asking people they respect to write custom articles for a single site. I’ve had to turn down several requests over the years for guest posts because Visible Technologies has not really supported that process (due to how it manages intellectual properties).

Still, guest blogging offers you a little of something that article swapping offers (other people create your content for you and they will probably link to your site from their site) and a little something that interviews offer (your visitors can see what other people — whom you find interesting — think about your industry).

Nonetheless, I just cannot see the average business site inviting guest bloggers over to talk about their products and services. The SEO community may not be wholly unique in this aspect, but I doubt there are many other industries where people feel comfortable writing content for their rivals.

However, if you are the business with an affiliate network, you may be able to leverage your affiliates in some creative ways. For example, you can feature your best performing affiliates in your monthly online newsletter (several major retailers have done this). Or you could ask your affiliates to interview you or let you write a guest post for their sites (just don’t rehash the same self-promotional shmucky crap for them). Some marketers have done that, too (mostly with canned self-promotional schmucky crap, so let’s move away from that style of writing).

If you’re going to be the star of your affiliate community, you need to provide your affiliates with high quality, unique value. Help them help you in the most Jerry Maguire-like fashion possible: put your heart and soul into the game and stop holding out for a bigger paycheck.

We have learned to create and use every type of user-generated content possible: surveys and polls, comments, guest articles, voting knobs, profiles, and more. We have done a very poor job of creating and using community-generated content.

When a community comes together to share an interest, people will ask questions. Someone should provide the answers. People will share points of view. Someone should challenge those points of view. People will celebrate their successes and bemoan their failures. Someone should be cheering them on.

Real community building does not consist of editing comments on your blog. Nor does real community building consist of bashing people who disagree with you — unless you only want to build a toxic community.

To create a positive, forward-looking community experience you have to go the extra mile and create unique, interesting, and potentially even useful content for people — and help them do the same. It cannot all be about you.

You can start raising the bar by demanding better performance from your freelance writers. Better yet, demand improving performance from your own marketing. Even if you’re just stitching together an affiliate site, you can find ways to create a good experience for your visitors. You tend to think they are only there to give you money. In reality, they are there to fulfill a need. That need unquestionably goes beyond making the purchase.

Engage with those people and help them help you in ways that help improve everyone’s Web experience. That’s the type of content and link building that stands the test of time. Everything else is just a spam filter waiting to be implemented.

There seems to be a new generation of script sellers out there. Their Z Power SEO solutions offer you the most profitable search conversion experience possible.

Is it too good to be true? Not exactly.

I’m sure this stuff works. I won’t predict how long it can work, although one package I just looked at (and which I have not seen before) offers to create email accounts, solve CAPTCHAS, and build RSS mashups for you.

RSS mashups … that is SUCH a 2007 tactic.

Read between the lines here: RSS mashups were being used by black hat SEO spammers years ago and now someone else is offering an RSS mashup spam package for sale. If it’s really THAT good, why is he giving up his advantage?

Because maybe he can make more money by selling it through an affiliate program?

So, what do the black hats use for their SEO tricks? How do you spot them? How do you deal with them? Well, your task as a Best SEO practitioner is not to police the Web or the search results, but here are a few signs that you’re competing against a high-powered SEO spammer (or maybe a script kiddie who couldn’t optimize his way out of a brown paper bag).

You get two things to work with in SEO: Links and Content.

• Link injection tools – These little programs find “do follow” blogs and forums and drop links for you. I first saw them in 2005/2006. The better ones register an account, drop a few messages, and maybe even target their comments to content on the site.
• Blog farming tools – These programs set up hundreds of blogs (usually using Wordpress) on domains you buy and host. They’ll populate the blogs with RSS feed summaries (or whole posts) from all over the Web (or maybe just from Syndic8t’s spammy RSS feed list). I first came across a blog farm in 2006.
• Autogenerating tools – Some people call them article spinners. Some people call them dynamic content creators. They come in all forms. Spinning is controversial because some people see it as a cheat, even though it may create very original content. I’ve come across many schlocky spinners that publish garbage. Some are better than others.
• Text injection tools – Got a hankering to be big in social media? I’ve only seen text injection tools at work for the past year or so. Some may be older but the ones I’m aware of are less than 6 months out of beta. These tools will Tweet, Hub, Stumble, Publish, or do whatever it is you want to do with social media. They create a huge footprint that would take about six Google data centers to notice. For now.
• Artificial blogs – Some people are unbelievably good at creating realistic blogs. When other analysts ask me for an opinion on why a funky-looking site is probably not for real, that means even seasoned professionals are not sure of what they’re looking at. These blogs are used for a variety of reasons: some to carry AdSense, some to position links for other sites, some to test algorithms — and maybe some are just being mean.

I’m not telling anyone to stay away from these kinds of tools. If you have an opportunity to use this technology, it may indeed give you exactly the results you want. Some of the better systems will meter out the links in a randomized pattern so it looks like you’re acquiring links at a normal pace.

Then again, I’m not promising you won’t be caught, filtered, penalized, banned, or kicked out of any affiliate programs.

If you’re going to go play with fire, expect to be burned. You had better be willing and able to take some big hits because if you buy in to all the promotional hype you find on the Websites pitching these products you’re asking for trouble, plain and simple.

In every gold rush, the people who make the most money are the merchants selling picks, pans, and shovels to the miners. A few miners become rich. Everyone else just becomes a nameless face in a historic photograph, wishing history knew who they were.

The bottom line here is that there ARE substitutes for good, old-fashioned hard work. You can buy content, you can buy links, you can steal content, you can steal links. You cannot blame anyone but yourself if you get caught, though.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

What is the best free SEO technique that you can use? More importantly, what makes an SEO technique “free”? An economist would quickly tell us there is no such thing as a free lunch. So one should ask if there are any truly “free” SEO techniques.

I submit that there are no truly free SEO techniques. They all come with a cost. But I suspect that anyone interested in the topic of “best free SEO technique” is probably looking for a way to optimize that doesn’t cost them money. Low-budget search engine optimization has its place in the field but people should understand that all their do-it-yourself SEO is costing them money.

How much is an hour of your time worth to you? That is, how much would you actually bill another person (or business) for your time? $25? $50? $100? That’s pretty cheap SEO but it’s still expensive if your search engine optimization doesn’t bring you back at least that much money. DIY techniques are expensive if they don’t produce a return on investment.

Still, what can be said about free SEO Techniques? Are there no-dollar-down techniques anyone can use and, if so, which one(s) would be the best? That’s what we’re here to figure out. So let’s start with the very basic stuff:

Free SEO Technique No. 1: Build your own Website. Many companies literally throw thousands of dollars at Web designers to build them wonderful Web sites. Your Web designer may be the Frank Lloyd Wright of his class — the Warren Buffet of Web design — but frankly you don’t need his services. Not for search engine optimization. The fastest, easiest, simplest way to create an optimized Website is to download the Wordpress software and install it.

You’re done. Is it ugly? Yes. But aesthetics have absolutely nothing to do with search engine optimization.

Free SEO Technique No. 2: Write your own content. Most people wrongly believe they cannot write content. Many people foolishly convince themselves they don’t have time to write content. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in the time it takes you to explain why you don’t have time to write your own articles, you could have written enough content for one Web page. All that time you spend sending emails back and forth with your Web designer and SEO tech — yeah, you could have written a TON of articles.

On a good day I can write between 30 and 40 articles. At the height of my writing productivity some years past I was putting out about 50 articles a day.

I normally ask my copy specialists to write 5-10 articles a day. That’s 5-10 articles you have taken the time to think about, research, and edit. The average business operator who insists s/he cannot blog will write anywhere from 10 to 30 emails a day. To create a successful blog you only need to write 1 article per day, it doesn’t need to be more than 100-200 words long, and most people wouldn’t know if you mis-spelled something anyway. Heck, most people cannot even use their personal pronouns correctly (”Clem and myself will get this done right away…”).

Free SEO Technique No. 3: Write a long-winded, thoughtful comment on someone else’s blog once each day. Don’t embed any links in the comment — but you’re allowed to use the link field in the blog comment form.

What does this get you? It shows people you’re willing to take the time to share their passions, and they will click on that link under your name and they will visit your blog and some of them will link to your blog. So you’re killing two birds with one stone: you’re creating a name for yourself (which is worth more than a million links because people will search for you after reading a few of your thoughtful comments) AND you’re attracting those high value editorially-given links.

Free SEO Technique No. 4: Write about other people’s sites. Write often. Write liberally. Link out to those sites. They don’t have to be competitor sites. Just write about someone else’s site and don’t ask for anything in return.

What does this get you? The thanks from many people who are struggling to achieve some visibility for their sites. If you are sincere in your comments and selective in who you write about, you’ll find you are quietly building a community of friends and allies who will help you in many ways through the years.

Free SEO Technique No. 5: Make sure your blog pings lots of ping servers. You can find lists of them across the Web. The better you are at pinging, the more likely your blog will achieve search recognition quickly. “Search recognition” just means your articles appear in various search indexes. The sooner you get your content into the search indexes, the better.

Pinging alone does nothing. You have to write the articles. See free SEO Technique No. 2 for more details.

So that’s five (5) free SEO Techniques. Notice I did not say anything about keyword research, meta tags, title tags, SEO plug-ins, toolbars, link research, 301-redirects, metrics, or any of that other tedious stuff that people are so passionate about. You literally do not need to fuss with any of that stuff if all you want to do is just use the best free SEO techniques.

You can go a long way using these free SEO techniques. You can even compete in some competitive queries using them. That doesn’t mean you should only do SEO this way. It just means that it’s doable (this way) if you want to do it this way.

And which of the five is the best free SEO technique? All of them.

Think about that answer for a while. I believe you’ll see why soon enough.

I see this question often. People want to know which blog platform works best for SEO. That’s really a terrible question to ask for several reasons, the most important being that you might not actually be able to use the best SEO blog platform.

There are many blog platforms out there. Generally speaking, any blog platform that allows you to do the following is suitable for SEO (even if you have to install plug-ins to make it work):

• Create crawlable, indexable individual pages for each article
• Create crawlable, indexable tag pages
• Create crawlable, indexable category pages
• Create unique, keyword-rich article titles that are used in H1 (or equivalent), page URLs, and meta description
• Embed links anywhere in your blog post without having to click on some stupid graphic that pops up a form in a window

If you’re gasping in horror at the idea of creating DUPLICATE CONTENT (dunh, dunh, dunh!) get over it. The less you fuss over duplicate content, the better.

Still, if I had my druthers I’d druther that the tag and category pages looked a little different. It’s okay for a tag page to show just the linked title of the article, the author, and the posting date. Maybe include the meta description. It’s okay for the category page to show a little bit more, like the first paragraph or two of each article.

I don’t need monthly or weekly archives but I’ll take them as people usually do not link to them.

The bottom line here is you can use just about any blog platform to create the best blog for SEO. There is no such thing as an “SEO friendly” blog platform (because anything “SEO friendly” usually becomes “SEO toxic”).

But once you settle on which blog will be your best blog for SEO, you’re stuck because, frankly, most people who blog for SEO really, really seem to suck at blogging for SEO. The best SEO blog posts rarely come from the SEO community.

Why is that? Now, don’t get up on your high horse and say you’re too busy to blog about SEO. Truth be told, you probably write better for your SEO blog than for your client blogs — and THAT is the problem, boys and girls. Your best SEO blog posts cannot, should not, and must not be left for your SEO blogs. They don’t do your clients any good.

I read a lot of press releases, free distribution articles, and subscription blog articles and let me tell you, the vast majority of them are horribly written. Even assuming there is a fair amount of article spinning going on (either manually or through software), there are obviously human-written articles being pushed out to these networks for the sole purpose of building links.

People should not wonder at why the links seem so weak. After all, you have to attract links in order to pass value through your links, and a lot of SEOs devote as little time as possible to writing articles for their press release, free ezine archive, and blog network services. It shows, too.

You should sit down with your own personal blog and pick 25 articles on your favorite link-building networks and link to those articles. Do it out there where everyone can see what you’re linking to. Write passionate, bold, loving articles about those link-building articles that your associates in SEO have provided for you.

I guarantee you there isn’t an SEO in the business who would be willing to do that with his or her personal blog. That’s because all those free press releases, free ezine articles, and free blog posts are crap. They aren’t worth the money your clients are spending on them. If they were, real people would be linking to them.

So the best blog for SEO is the blog that selects and publishes only the best blog posts for SEO: real articles that are written from the heart by someone who finds the topic interesting. They set out with the goal of providing information or an opinion. It’s amazingly simple and easy to do. So why don’t more SEOs do that?

I see articles with broken links, malformed HTML formatting, incomprehensible expressions, and some of the oddest collections of links bundled together. Do these link building SEOs have no shame? Do they take no pride in what they do?

It’s easy enough to see that if you blast enough links out there onto the Web some of them will pass value. But think about the time you’re wasting to by creating crappy content no one in their right mind would link to. If you want to create value for your clients then you should create valuable content, even if the content’s only purpose is to link out to some Web site with appropriate anchor text.

That’s how you create the best blog posts for SEO. Think about it.

SEO Theory Blog Update

I’ve been asked whether there will be another “20 Hard Core SEO Tips” article on SEO Theory this year. If you’re not familiar with the topic, in 2007 (on a whim) I wrote up 20 Hard Core SEO Tips. The article proved to be monumentally popular.

Curious about whether I could do it again, last year I wrote 20 More Hard Core SEO Tips. While that article did not generate as much buzz as the first, it did receive a lot of traffic.

And this year (once again on October 16, as with the previous two articles) I will be publishing another 20 hard core tips article on SEO Theory. Please be sure to check it out and tell your friends about it.

UPDATE: Read Another 20 Hard Core SEO Tips on SEO Theory.