Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Mark,

I have been spending quite a bit of time looking through my competitors' linking sites so it is good to know that that wasn't in vain.

I completely agree with you about linkbait, it can be very hard work and the success rate is very different each time (which can be great at times but extremely frustrating at others!).

One thing I have always wondered is that a lot of SEO companies will offer, lets say, 500 directory submissions to clients each month. Do you think that a lot of these links are just worthless links, and if you don't mind divulging, how many directories would you say you submit to on average each month? (just so I can get an idea of the scale of what I should be aiming for).

Thanks again.

Within your title tag, you shouldn't generally use connecting words like 'and', 'is', etc. Stick to just using 'Holidays Ireland' within this part of your webpage.

For the META description you should then use connecting words to make it coherent and understandable to users. The META description doesn't actually play an effect on your SEO rankings but remember that it will show keywords in bold if a user has searched for 'Holidays in Ireland', which will increase your click-through rate.

Hope this helps

Matt.

When you get a link through from Twitter (i.e. through someone tweeting your blog post or re-tweeting your tweet with a link to your website), the root domain that it will appear as will be 't.co'.

't.co' is a link shortening service that Twitter uses so any links to your website showing in open site explorer coming from this root domain are from Twitter.

Hope this has helped.

Matt.

Hi Guys,

One area of my link building that I carry out is looking for online directories and social bookmarking websites to submit my website to. I do this in order to gain some backlinks to my website. What I want to know is are they really worth my time, and if so, which types would you say are the most important?

I have obviously been through many directory lists, both on SEOmoz and on other websites, and also performed various searches to find relevant directories to my website. I just feel that posting up a link that lies deep in a directory online that, more often than not, have very low PA and lots of outbound links will offer very little in terms of SEO. If anything, this could really bring down the quality of my links and be detrimental to my website, right?

This is a subject that I have been thinking about for a while and especially with the recent algorithm update from Google and the attack on many web directories that are, lets say, 'not playing by the rules', I'm worried that this will have a negative impact for my website.

Let me know your thoughts guys and if you have any tips on how to get higher quality links from these kind of submission then I'm all ears!

Matt.