By Ricci Mathew

SEO or search engine optimization is all about developing high quality links. Getting more links means getting more people into your site, increasing the website’s popularity. This is directly related to business success as it gets us more sales and fulfills business objectives. However developing links has to be gradual process and every link should be useful and with a purpose.

Ok now what is DLR or deep link ratio? Well, first let us first define a deep link. Deep links are incoming back-links to any specific page within the website other than the home page. And DLR or deep link ratio is the ratio of deep-links to website root links. The total deep links divided by the total number of incoming links will give us the DLR that is expressed as a percentage.Thus a website’s DLR is just the comparison of the number of backlinks that go to pages under the top level of the website to the total number of backlinks for the entire website.” There are many free online DLR calculator tools on the web to calculate a website’s DLR and it takes justr a few seconds to get a site’s DLR.

There is no defined standard for DLR. But websites can have a high or a low DLR ratio depending on the type of content that they have. However generally speaking a higher deep link ratio is considered to be better especially if you have an SEO based link development program. Yes, one must make it look natural and blend it well.

There are many commercial websites that are built just like an online departmental store where everyone first gets into the home page and from there find their way to the required categories and departments. Probably such sites have a lower DLR as they usually need not have any great content on deeper pages and so a high DLR does not matter much for such sites. However one must note that a high DLR has been known to be associated with a higher page rank and thus is a considerable factor for search engine optimization.

The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of Outsource Strategies International (OSI), a US based company that offers services in Search Engine Optimization, SEM, PPC advertising for clients across the US.

By Jarret Turner, Expert Author

When you know you have a great website or product to offer you want the world to know about it too. You could spend a lot of money advertising but in the long run this may cost you more money than you make. Alternatively, you could consider reciprocal links to other related websites. This could boost traffic to your website and the links will also increase your popularity with the search engines.

The advantages of reciprocal links outweigh the disadvantages for several reasons. When you link to another website it allows their traffic to click onto your website which increases your traffic.

When you use reciprocal links, their traffic can become your traffic and you do not face any advertising bills. Reciprocal links can be a great idea for those who are just starting out in their own business or website online and can’t really afford to pay out a lot on advertising until they get more traffic to their site.

The main disadvantage of reciprocal links is that you share everything, including the customers. By placing links to other websites on your site, you are encouraging them to visit these other sites. So, while you may be getting increased traffic, you may experience reduced sales as visitors navigate away to other websites.

You may also need to watch out for reciprocal link scams. You may have seen emails from people requesting to exchange links to your website. Sometimes, these are legitimate, but often they are not and the link to your website may end up on a non-searchable site with a bunch of other links.

This brings us to the point that the value of reciprocal links depends very much on the site where your link appears. If it is on a popular website with plenty traffic and a good search engine ranking, then a reciprocal link is well worth it. However, a reciprocal link is worthless if it appears on some obscure website that receives few visitors.

If someone offers a reciprocal link to your website, make sure to check them out thoroughly to ensure that the link will genuinely be of benefit to your website and your business.

The benefits of reciprocal links for your website will depend very much on your own circumstances and the quality of links you can find. If you are just starting out and are receiving few visitors to your website, some good reciprocal links could help kick start your website. However, if you are already well-established there may be better advertising and marketing options available to you.

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Google’s Matt Cutts came in to do a rare post at a DigitalPoint Forums thread on this topic, Cutts said:

I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:

• Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
• What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
• If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

Links are one of the most important parts of successfully running a search engine optimization campaign. As a matter of fact, having well-placed links will do a lot to help to push your website to the top of the search engine result pages for the keywords of your choice. Although there are many different ways for you to acquire these links, there are some ways which are almost automated in nature. By taking advantage of every aspect of your link building campaign, you can not only get your website listed in the search engines quickly, you can also be benefited by the incoming links for a long time to come.

One of the easiest forms of linking that exists is that which is found in directory submissions. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of directories for you to choose from on the Internet where you can post a link to your website. Some of these directories are free to post links and others charge a fee, either a one time fee or a recurring fee. It is up to you to decide if it is worth the effort to post to the free directories and if it is worth the cost to post to some of the paid directories.

Some of the paid directories are very important for you to be listed in, regardless of what the price is. This is especially the case if you are a little bit experienced with search engine optimization and are fairly confident in your ability to get your website listed well on the search engines from your efforts. Some of the paid directories that you want to make sure you’re part of include Yahoo and Joeant.com. Yahoo is fairly expensive at $299 a year but by having a link in the Yahoo Directory, you will be giving your SEO efforts of major shot in the arm. Popular directories such as GO WebGuide are an excellent way for you to position yourself with some back links as well.

Submitting your website to the free directories is also an excellent way to give yourself a boost in the SERPS as well as getting yourself listed on the search engines initially. Google does not necessarily give as much weight to these free search engine submissions but remember, Google is not the only kid on the block. Yahoo also has the ability to send you a massive amount of traffic if you’re positioned well in their search engine results and MSN can send you traffic as well. Each of these lesser search engines will place a lot of weight on many incoming links from these free directories.

All in all, submitting to directories, whether free or paid is an excellent way to set yourself up for success in your search engine optimization efforts. Make sure, however, that you don’t stop with just a few simple directory submissions. Make it a part of your overall efforts to continue improving on your rankings in the search engines.

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Directories are holding their own. According to web-directories.ws directories are healthy and mostly growing…

Here are the latest stats of PR, based on the 10,000+ directories in the database. Without getting into any real math it appears that PR is up across the board, except for the NA category.

Directories in Web-Directories.ws Database

The following table is a comparison before and after the latest PR update.

The size of the directory sample has grown by 14% so anything above that would be considered an increase. There seems to be a particular significant increase in PR5 and PR7 directories. PR2, PR3, PR4 and PR6s stayed about the same. The percentage amount of PR0s decreased and the number of N/A directories decreased substantially.

Factors that may affect these numbers:

• Many of the directories are experiencing their first real PR update, in which they have been around long enough to rise from N/A or PR0. In this respect it should be expected that the numbers increase.
• Most of our submissions come from brand new directories, meaning that we are constantly adding new PR0 and N/A to our database.
• The directory data contains a couple of categories that are not directories (social media & press releases). The PR8s and PR9s often fall into these categories so these numbers are not anything to get excited about.