google search results for
Wow! I am #1 on google’s search results page for the search phrase “ad posting service“. It’s a great achievement. Click on the image at left to see actual search results on google.
Content is the king. No fancy design is required for SEO. Don’t bother for PR. Only a few backlinks form related sites are enough for reaching first position on SERP. I didn’t use any graphics on my site except my own photo. My site is also on google’s first or second page for some craigslist and free classifieds related search terms. I am lucky to get most of my visitors form search engines. And most importantly, conversion rate for the traffic from search engines (particularly google) is very high as compared to traffic from other sources.
So try to put related quality contents on your site and get some quality backlinks. Reaching google’s first page is not tough unless you are competing for some highly valued terms.
I am not offering full SEO service yet although I am learning SEO basics and offering link building service. Now I am confident that I can offer SEO service professionally. I was doing SEO for my client’s site gotengines.com on experimental basis for last few months. It’s now on google’s first page for “used engines” (without quote marks). I am preparing myself to offer SEO service very soon.
Both Bookmarking and Directory submission are acceptable way of getting one-way backlinks that helps in getting high PR and better position on SERP. Several years ago directory submission was the prime source of backlinks. Now it the social bookmarking sites are playing vital role in getting backlinks. So the question arises which one is now more effective : bookmarking or directory submission? The answer of this question is undecided.
Directory submission still works nice for increasing link popularity of an website. But it has some limitations over bookmarking. Bookmarking is more versatile. For example: if you have a blog on blogspot.com or wordpress.com you can’t submit it on most of the web directories. There are only few blog directories which may accept your free blog. Still you can easily promote your blog or blog posts on bookmarking sites. Similarly most of the directories accepts only homepage. Inner pages aren’t accepted by most of the free web directories. If you have an important inner page you can easily promote it on social bookmarking sites.
I like social bookmarking over directory submission for another reason: it is getting traffic. Free web directories rarely send traffic to the sites submitted. On the other hand popular social bookmarking sites like digg, stumbleUpon can send thousands of traffic.
I frequently face a question from my potential clients whether ad posting on free classifieds sites will help in Search Engine Optimization. Well, before answering YES or NO to this question let’s examine what happens when ads are posted on free online.
Most of the free classifieds sites including craigslist.org and backpage.com allow hyperlink to other website in ad description. So getting one-way backlink from free classifieds advertising is quite possible. The problem is that those backlinks aren’t permanent. Each post has a certain life span ranging from 7 days to 6 months (popular sites have lower life span while new sites have longer life span for the postigns). Postings will expire after that time and the link will no longer exist. So one time posting will not be of much help in the long run. In case of continuous posting on a weekly or monthly schedule, search engines will always see some backlinks from those sites and will index those pages. So to get benefit from free classifieds sites for SEO, continuous ad posting is required.
Some sites like vivastreet.co.uk allows to reposting and the URL of the original post doesn’t change upon reposting. In such cases getting almost permanent link is possible provided the ad is renewed regularly.
Another option of SEO is also available. Although it is also transient in nature, sometimes it is highy effective. It is possible to post an ad whose body is filled up with targeted keywords in high density. Search engines like google picks the posting pages from popular free classifieds sites like craigslist within 24 hours (even earlier). And postings on craigslist and other popular free classifieds get very high position on SERP. So it is possible to reach google first page for some specific keywords within very short time with this method. But when the ad is expired, you loose everything.
Finally, it can be summarized that ad posting on free classifieds may be helpful in SEO but primary purpose of free classified advertising is not SEO. Getting targeted traffic quickly is the main purpose of free classified advertising.
