Internet Directory Services: www.idsonline.co.za

Add a Post to IDS Forum and be upgraded to a Premium Business Listing

IDS has launched a Business Forum to aid business in South Africa.

We are offering all our directory members a FREE years Premium Subscription. To get the free Premium Business listing (to the value of R500) there is one thing you need to do, you need to register on the IDS Business Forum, which is free and make a posting.

To benefit your business the most, come back to the forum regularly and participate. Take a look at how its done in the UK: UK Business Forum a valuable business resource that works!

So whats so great about a Premium Listing anyway?

Premium listing has a whole lot more to help you get connected to your potential clients, such as:

- priority listing – you come up 1st in the search results
- show your web page address
- clients can contact you via the site without showing your email address
- add in a detailed description of your business which Google will find.
- detailed description accepts html, thus it can look like a mini web page
- unlimited key words which search engines will find
- logo to reinforce your product branding
- include all your contact numbers
- include images
- full access to edit yourself or by a developer

Click here to read more about the Premium Business Listing,

So what do I need to do?

- Register on IDS Forum with your IDS username
- Introduce your business, products and service
- Add value to other form posts by adding posts or comments
- We will tie up your username and upgrade your listing
- Log onto IDS Online in about 2 days and complete your Premium Listing
- To be sure we have seen you, contact us with: username, full name, company & category!

Conditions apply:
- Special expires end of Feb 2009
- One Premium listing per company already listed as a free listing
- IDS Admin decision is final wrt upgrading of free listings

Looking forward to upgrading your listing!

IDS Team

Internet Directory Services
www.idsonline.co.za

Another value adding service IDS offers is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website, below we touch on a few important aspects of SEO.

Here is our first SEO review for 2009, we hope that you find it interesting and that you can take the ideas below and implement it in your own website.

Website: Exclusive Villas (http://www.exclusivevillas.co.za).

At first glance this website looks as if it’s in good shape from a SEO perspective.  However, this site is a good example of the importance of the little things.

Let’s have a look at the basics of SEO:
1) Title tags
2) Meta tags
3) URL structure
4) Content
5) Incoming links

On-site Optimisation factors

1) Title tags (click here if you don’t know what a title tag is); for most part the title tags are ok.  Each title tag is different, focusing on a specific keyword per page.  The selected keywords though are short in length and aren’t what we call long-tail keywords.  A good start is focusing on the region of which a website offers it’s services.  In this case it is Cape Town, so inserting the keyword ‘Cape Town’ in every title tag is more important than the website name.  Having ‘Exclusive Villas’ in the domain name should be enough to optimise for keyword ‘exclusive villas’, so there is no need to insert it into the title tag.

2) Meta tags (click here if you don’t know what a meta tag is) are devaluing the website, namely meta descriptions. They can play an important role in telling search engines the importance of certain keywords within each web page.  The content in some of the Meta Descriptions is duplicated from the page content.

3) The importance of URL structure is important especially when focusing on highly competitive keywords.  Exclusive Villas have implemented dynamic URLs which is not good for SEO.  A dynamic URL looks like this: /Villa_Display.asp?parentseq=3, a SEO friendly URL looks like this: /boutique-hotels.asp.  A good idea is to study your competitors, do they have SEO friendly URLs?  If so, then you are losing out even if you have a higher Page Rank than them and in this case it holds true for Exclusive Villas.  They have a PR of 5 but their competitors have PR’s of 2 and 1…  ISAPI Rewrite needs to be implemented for asp (provided the server is IIS).

Caution: If you’re considering rewriting your URLs, make sure a SEO walks you through this and that every legacy URL is 301-redirected to the new URL. This is very important! Don’t just rewrite the URLs just because I said so. Every Web site is unique. If you’re already enjoying solid rankings and traffic, you may want to leave it well enough alone.

4) Immediately when I look at the content of the site I can see a line of text at the top and at the bottom of each web page.  This will be seen by major search engines as spamming, especially as it is a <h1> tag.  It is good SEO practice to make a web page look as if the page is not optimised… this sounds strange but true!  I have no doubt that the site is being penalised because of these spammy words on each web page.  It would be a better idea to focus these keywords in the title tag, meta description and once or twice in the viewable content, making it as natural and flowing as possible.  I have worked with sites with no <h1> tags (click here if you don’t know what a <h1> tag is) and they still receive high rankings, although <h1> tags are important, it is not the be all and end all of on-site optimisation.

Off-site Optimisation factors

5) The incoming links to Exclusive Villas are generally very good, case in point, they have a PR of 5.  As we can always improve SEO and a website is never perfect, I would suggest looking at anchor text (click here if you don’t know what anchor text is) and analysing where the links are coming from.  The more incoming links a website can achieve which relates to their website the better.  Anchor text should focus on keywords which they want to target i.e. ‘villa rentals cape town’.

If Exclusive Villas implement these changes it will be interesting to see how it will affect their traffic.  Although no one can guarantee an increase in traffic after optimising a site (not even Google themselves), if done correctly I can confidently say that these little tweaks will make a world of difference to their targeted traffic resulting in more leads and more sales.

IDS is undergoing many exciting changes over the next couple of weeks/months, we are going through a redesign and rebranding.  We will slowly be introducing new functionalities which you as the user can experience and enjoy.  We are welcoming feedback so if you have any suggestions please contact us and fill us in on your thoughts.

If you haven’t already noticed IDS has launched a forum for the business community.  The forum is a great platform to ask questions within your industry and also a great area to market one’s services.  We have noticed that forums are working well in the US and UK, those who are providing good honest answers are well respected within their forum community.  We would like to take this same platform and bring it to our South African community.

IDS is also launching a fortnightly email, addressing problems company websites have; no matter how big or small.  Our inhouse SEO and social media marketing specialist will be reviewing South African company websites.  In the beginning it will be on a first come first serve basis, it will be a learning experience for so depending on the response we will re-evaluate early next year.  We encourage you to submit your company’s website URL to us; your company will learn and understand the importance of a well structured website from this review plus you will gain exposure through our newsletter.  We all learn together creating a stronger more resourceful community.

We look forward to your feedback!

IDS Team

Internet Directory Services
www.idsonline.co.za