Are you looking to create a lot of traffic to your site by submitting your site to business directories? Here’s your best bet.

Get listed on quality sites and a lot of IP blocks.

Don’t ever rely on a single directory or submitting to a large number of directories. That’s because most search inquiries are done on general search engines than specialist sites or b2b/b2c directories. Getting listed on general search engines and quality sites can be advantageous if you want to bring in a great number of sales leads. Your site ranking will be higher and so will your listing on the search results.

Click here to view the 100 Best Internet Directories.

Posted by Robert Kilonzo.

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I just finished reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, and believe me when I say that I couldn’t wait to write up a review of it. It’s the kind of thing you just want to share with everyone you meet.

Here at Omnistar, we take SEO seriously. That’s why after hearing so many good things about Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, I was excited to finally get a chance to read it. Now that I’ve finished all 331 pages of it, I’m even more excited than I was before.

Wall’s SEO Book does an excellent job of covering everything that you could possibly want to know about optimizing your site for search engines. From domain name decisions to logo designs, css tips to meta tags, Wall covers it all. And he doesn’t hold anything back. Reading Wall’s SEO Book is just like hiring him at his $500/hr rate, except you have to actually think, and he gets paid less.

Still, some people might balk at the $79 price tag on his downloadable ebook. But believe me: it’s well worth it. Wall writes in a readable style, and never advises you to go out and buy $900 worth of software on some other site; he gets straight to the point and tells you how to do what the professionals do. When I say that you will make back your $79 investment simply by implementing a couple of his ideas, I mean it.

I should mention here that Wall’s book is for long-term optimization only. He doesn’t distinguish between black and white-hat SEO, he simply talks about what works while avoiding what doesn’t. But although he experiments with some SEO practices that might increase search engine rankings temporarily, his SEO Book is geared only toward those practices that will help your site to build and maintain optimization in the long term.

Please notice that my recommendation of Wall’s SEO Book is not to give an affiliate link so I can make money. I’m recommending it because I really believe it works. Whether you’re a beginner at SEO or an expert who’d like to have a fully organized, readable list of everything there is to know about search engine optimization, you should buy Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. It really is search engine optimization at its finest.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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Your domain name, whether you like it or not, is your online identity. A lot of effort is ordinarily put into choosing an effective domain, whether it is keyword-heavy, or the same as your storefront name. Less attention is paid to the possibility of utilizing different top-level domains, simply because ‘dot-com’s are traditionally the most popular. But it can pay to try to take advantage of a different top level domain, depending on your business type.

Top level domains (TLDs) are the part of a web address that comes after the domain name. You can find a full list of available domains at IANA.org, whee they have a country code list and a generic tld list. Some of the more famous ones are listed below.

.com

Commercial: Open to any registrant.

.biz

Business: Must be commercial.

.info

Information: Open to any registrant.

.jobs

Companies: Open only to advertise jobs for own company.

.net

Network: Open to any registrant.

.org

Organization: Open to any registrant.

.pro

Profession: Open for doctors, attorneys, and cpas only.

.fm

Federated States of Micronesia: Common radio broadcaster tld.

.la

Laos: Common Los Angeles tld.

.tv

Tuvalu: Common television broadcaster tld.

.us

United States: Open to any USA-centered registrant.

The most important of these is the .com tld. Even if you decide to go with a different tld for marketing purposes, you must keep the .com tld as a 301 redirect to your main site; otherwise, you run the risk of a competitor claiming the .com version of your business name and profiting off your marketing.

That said, using a different top level domain can sometimes reap large dividends. One popular news blog uses a .tk tld, and advertises their site with "tk" phrases to push the unusual domain on blog readers. Having an unusual top level domain can boost your brand by making it stand out; and the drawback of it becoming less memorizable due it not being a .com is negated so long as you also register the .com version and have it 301 redirect to your actual tld.

If your business caters to a local market, having a local tld can be very useful. If you’re expanding into a new market and want to register the appropriate domain, make sure to do research first. Although .gb is the official tld for Great Britain, most companies there use .co.uk addresses. Also, former Soviet Union countries do not regularly use their own country codes; .su tlds are still very popular there.

Be careful not to put duplicate content on each of your domains. Always use 301 redrects to your main page and keep all your content there; otherwise, search engines may penalize you for serving duplicate content. But remember that there are no penalties for using less popular domains by itself, and it pays to be creative with anything that you market.

That said, you do have to be careful about a few items. Though it is rare, occasionally overzealous corporate spam blockers will deny email that gives links to a .biz name. This never occurs on spam blockers that you can purchase online, since blocking all .biz content is going overboard, but every once in a while a system admin will think it is a good idea and block all such e-mails from getting through their server. Also, sometimes the less often used tlds carry a connotation of nonprofessionalism; .my may look interesting due to it sporting a two-letter word (e.g., http://oh.my), but if your business has such a tld and it isn’t obvious why you chose it, then it could hurt your image.

If you do decide to leave the comfort of the .com arena and try out an alternate tld, make sure to market the name aggressively. Take advantage of your unusual domain name, because it is something that your company will sport that others won’t. Emphasize it, perhaps by using wordplay, or making it a different color in the logo. The point is to make the alternate tld work for you. After all, if choosing an alternate tld doesn’t help your brand, then you shouldn’t use it in the first place.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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Good project management software is hard to find, but thankfully, after you read this, you won’t have to go looking very far. That’s because our group here at Omnistar Etools has already found the ultimate project management software: 37signal’s Basecamp.

Basecamp has everything you could ever want: an ease of functionality that allows even the most computer illiterate to understand and participate, an intuitive interface that allows and even encourages clear communication, and a beautiful design that will get you bonus points every time you use the software with clients.

Using Basecamp makes it very clear how closely good communication is linked to completion of projects on time and as ordered. With Basecamp, everything is so easy to use that poor communication on a project is nearly impossible. And the tools used to track hours spent on a project makes it clear exactly how efficiently work is coming along on each type of task.

Perhaps more impressive is the ability to use Basecamp not just with your employees, but also with clients to keep them abreast of projects as they’re being worked on. Keeping clients ‘in the loop’ has never been so easy: you can upload files for viewing, and they can easily leave comments that can be replied to at will. And since the site design is fully customizable, you can maintain the look and feel of the rest of your site.

But by far the best thing about Basecamp is the main Project Overview page. There, you can see exactly how everything is progressing, with upcoming deadlines, details of who is responsible for what, and reports of how many hours each person has spent on doing their assignments. Plus, it even creates an RSS feed, so you can be informed at your convenience or even on the go via PDA or cell phone!

Basecamp truly does offer everything you’ve ever wanted in project manangement software, and then some. If you haven’t used it before, you will be amazed at how simple a thing as ease of use will streamline your project completion. We use it here at Omnistar Etools every day, and it truly is something that we cannot imagine going without. It truly is the last project management tool you will ever need.

Posted by Eric Herboso

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