There are thousands of article directories all over the internet, but if your business is in UK you should be looking for those in UK, as you will need few high-quality inbound links from other UK sites. For that purpose, I’ve put together a list of UK Article Directories that we use.

1. Great Articles
2. UK Article Directory
3. Article Depot
4. Loan Articles
5. British Article Directory
6. Free Article Directory
7. Bunzola
8. Write it on the Wall
9. PageQuest Article Directory
10. Flairman UK
11. Directory Niche
12. Submit Shop
13. Article – Directory
14. Solvo Articles
15. Wordcat
16. Article Marketing
17. Business on the Net
18. Cool Seller
19. Link Directory
20. UK Business Listing
21. UK Shop Pages
22. UK Shopping Listing

Here is a great link for any site. aboutus.com – go here and add your site details. Getting the search engines to find your site then index it is your first priority. A link from this web site is a good link, Google and the rest spider here quite often, also it is a good link in Google’s eyes – as it lists fairly high up on the list of links.

Play around at aboutus.org, add contact details if you want, add more information about your site, make it good, it is worth the 30 minutes you will spend doing a little typing.

Lets take a closer look at one ov the web site. Fruit Smoothie Recipes will serve as a good example here for link building. As you will see the link is part of a sentence, near the top of the article, and has the key words that we want this website to be found for.

These are the hardest links to get and the ones that are treated in the highest regard by search engines. Having a link like this http://www.fruitsmoothierecipes.me.uk is okay, but just okay. Having the self same link in a list of other links on a page full of them does not help a lot – but it is always better than not having it at all.

Therefore submitting to directories that do not list keywords as anchor text is not great and often time can be better spent getting links that really help.
So bear all this in mind when writing your blog – always have at least one link from your blog everytime you write to your company web site.

If you find that your site is not indexed then you need some links for the search engines to find you. Many new web designers when they are first starting out will go to the search engines and submit their site directly to the search engine and then wait… Don’t bother, there are quicker and easier ways to get the spiders to find you.

If your site is indexed then you have passed the first post.

Getting your first links to your site may seem daunting. Where do you start, how do I ask people I don’t know for links? I don’t know anyone else that has a web site, etc. Don’t worry, there are easy ways to deal with the first links.

Search engines, like Google, visit blogs almost every day if they are written on a regular basis. That is where to start. If you already read a few blogs about your own industry, leave a comment with your name and your web site were it is asked for; remember though try and contribute to the subject, just saying “Great post thanks” is not a great contribution, if it is in your area and you know something worth saying then say it. Work at it till you have something worth saying. NEVER type your web site into the comments field, that is spam and will be considered as such by almost all bloggers.

One last point here, make sure the search engines can find your site and read your navigation. Search engines don’t like websites that are completely written in Flash, so re-consider. Are you using Javascript for navigation, if so get a site map up in plain HTML. Stay away from frames, just makes the job harder, sometimes impossible. Don’t make the job of getting up the rankings harder than it is already.

Search engine optimization is purely targeted at search engines, it is a method to gain organic long term growth and visitors. On page SEO targets areas such as page layout (coding), meta tags, keywords, title tag, amount of code on page v’s the amount of text on the page, great original content and enough of it on each page, internal link structure, good relevant headings (using H tags and again keywords in the headings), and alt tags.

This is all on page Search engine optimization it all helps and is helpful to getting good rankings in the search engine results page (SERP). These are tasks that are withn your control and control them you should, there is no point in missing the obvious.

Off page SEO is harder to control. Getting links and relevant links is the way forward. Any links from most any pages will do to start with, as times goes on and your pages are indexed by Google it is time to narrow that to what will help in the long term. That is relevant links. Relevant links have two essential components. Link text or anchor text, I want link text that lead to my site to say “Dublin Web Design” or “Web Design Dublin” some of these words can be changed to Designer or Ireland instead of Dublin, but you get the general idea. Why? This is the most important area of all search engine optimization, because this currently is the most important item on the Google algorithm – it is that simple. You might think it is not fair, you have great content, but without those links very few people are going to see that you have this great content.

If number one on the Google algorithm is link text, then the number two is relevance. This term is a bit more fuzzy than link text. Relevant can be all over the board. However a good way of seeing it is if the page you want the link from returns for the search items you want listed for. Let me explain this a bit more. I want to be listed for “web design dublin” therefore getting a link from any page on the internet that is indexed for web design will do nicely. A quick search reveals that there are 1,110,000,000 pages in the Google index for that search term. This is were my main relevant links are hiding. But remember that is only one key search term I want listing for. You, as I do, will want to list for many different keywords. Sometimes targeting keywords that are not so highly fought over can produce just as good results quicker and for longer, this is known as the long tail.

This outlines search engine optimization. Search engine marketing CAN include SEO, however it does not have to. Search engine marketing is as it says – marketing. Good SEM should include as least some element of SEO, for example – all on page SEO. SEM includes, Pay Per Click (PPC) using the likes of Google adwords, Yahoo! and MSN also have similar services. It is a way to easily control a marketing budget and ones that is very flexible and can be changed at a minutes notice. Link buying falls into the SEM arena from companies like Text Link ads. Buying banner adverts on other sites at cost per thousand displays, paying blogs to review your site at review me, SEM is often paid for and, though it does not have to be, it is often short term and usually used in conjunction with SEO campaigns to get the short term results that a company or client requires.