1. Great link traffic back to your site.

There are loads of opportunities to exchange links with other bloggers, get comments to your sites.

2. Send broadcasts, initiate and participate in discussions.

Once you establish friendships , join groups, neighborhoods, plus more. You can send broadcasts for everyone in your friend groups to read.

3. Blog Catalog constantly works on improving the directory.

Just like a blog, it is never static. There are always attempts to improve and they listen to all their members.

Now, of course, there are more than 3 reasons and if you are a member of Blog Catalog please share your reasons. And if you are not a member and you have a blog I encourage you to join.
Rosie

Here is my current assessment and I welcome anyone to add to this or make corrections.

Search Engines

1. Search engines use computer programs called Robots,spiders and worms to automatically go from page to page through the web, reading content, and adding it to their databases. This speeds up the process of getting your site indexed.
2. You usually only have to tell a Search Engine the URL (address) of your site and it takes care of the rest.
3. The “spiders, robots or worms” search in different ways – and different parts of the Internet. The same search with different engines will yield different results.
4. Some index words in the title, URL, introductory paragraphs, or full-text of all documents on a web site or blog. Some use a combination of these words and phrases, all of which are entered into the search engine’s database.

About.com has a super, I mean super comprehensive listing of search engines. Click Here

Search engines also LOVE blogs. Imagnine a tank full of hungry fish. As soon as new food comes they go for it. Your blog site entries are fresh food for the search engines. Whereas, static web pages, that change very little and often, cause little stir with the search engines.

Directories

1. Directories are run by humans, live people, who review web sites and categorize them within their directories.

2. The staff consists of webmasters,directory staff and or volunteers. Sometimes staff are subject experts; sometimes not.

3. Review of you site require significant human effort to develop and maintain. Hence, it may take longer for your site to be indexed.

4. Some charge and some do not. For example, Yahoo charges a non-refundable fee of $299 if you site does not have adult content. If it is adult content it is $600. However, the payment of the fee does not assure you acceptance. But if accepted it gives you great placement.

Check out , Libarians Index, DMOZ, Medweb and Yahoo’s Directory

Yahoo and DMOZ are the two biggest directories on the web, but other important directories include local directories for your state, town, chamber of commerce, etc.

Hope this helps to make it clearer for many folks who want to know.

Note: if you do not have a Google Alert on your blog name stop reading this and go to Google. Type in Google Alert and set your blog name as an alert. This way you will know if mention has been made about your site in the world wide web.
I claimed this site a lonnnnng time ago but recently noted that it is showing as unclaimed so I am doing the quick claim by including the code in this post. I suspect that the unclaimed status is due to a change in my password from the standard Admin, Admin which leaves your site wide open for hacking   so be sure to change that password if you are on the WordPress plateform.

Now, I strongly suggest that you register so you can take advantage of other features of this easy to use directory. Also, study the extensive listing of categories. When you submit your blog url you can list it in two catergories.

Hope to see you there.

Rosie

I will also give you some definitions of two terms that you will run into on their submission form. Excellent for search engine optimization (SEO)but may be a bit confusing for the new blogger.Meanwhile here is part of the description of the site below directly from the home page:

BlogListing.Net takes pride in remaining a free blog directory and takes steps to continue to improve it’s own rankings in the search engines, to help pass that along to the listings within this blog directory.

We are currently accepting blog submissions for the directory. If you own, or know of a quality blog that needs added, please suggest it for acceptance.

Now some of you might have some questions about the submission form. There are two terms that is not clear for the new blogger. One of them is .reciprocal links I give you the following definition from Wiki.

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Example: Alice and Bob have websites. If Bob’s website links to Alice’s website, and Alice’s website links to Bob’s website, the websites are reciprocally linked. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy. The other word is meta description. This is a powerful term and not boomer friendly at all.(smile)

So it is important to note that you must place the code they provide on the blog you are submitting. Then put the url of the blog in the space for reciprocal link. THIS MUST BE DONE BEFORE YOU COMPLETE THE FORM Be sure to include the http:// so I would include http://www.bloggingforboomers. And the code back to their site is here.

But after some problems getting the form to accept the link,  probably because I am still learning, I decided to leave that space blank. Hopefully, I will still get accepted.

The other term used is meta description.

So I went to Ask.com and asked the question “How to write a meta description.” The result was an excellent article by Susan Ward. I am placing the first couple of paragraphs here and the rest you can follow with the link following the excerpt.

Put your keyword phrase in your page’s other metatags.

For the best search engine optimization results, you want to be sure that your keyword phrase is in all your page’s other metatags, too.

Putting your keyword phrase in your page’s metadescription is important not only because it’s another part of your page that “tells” search engine spiders what your page is about, but because many search engines use your page’s metadescription to describe your page in their search listings.

So writing the page’s metadescription is a special challenge; for good search optimization, it has to include your keyword phrase several times, but it also has to be written in such a way that it’s enticing to people browsing search engine listings. If you’re finding writing this metatag difficult, aim for clarity – the clearer an idea you give people about what your page is about, the more likely they are to visit your page.

The metadescription for the page I’ve used as an example below reads:

[blockquote]Why waste time on Web site promotion methods that will only bring you minuscule returns, if any? If you’re prepared to work on them, these five free Web site promotion techniques will deliver, rewarding you with the increased site traffic you’re looking for.[/blockquote] You will also list your keyword phrase in your metakeywords tag. You might also list other related keywords here that appear in the content of your page. If you do, list no more than six or seven.

Once again this is from Susan Ward

To read the entire article.

So today I attempted to give you some search engine optimization info as well as another blogging directory to submit your blog(s) I hope it helps. Now I am going to go back and submit some more blogs to bloglisting.

However, I must be honest with you and say it can be frustrating. So if anyone is out there who has had more experience let me know your insights. It seems that it is best to leave the space for recipical links empty because with one blog it kept telling us that the blog listing button was not on the site. So I have sent two messages to the owners. I could not find a help section. They were great and got right back to me. So I feel better knowing someone is there I can talk to. I will make the suggestion about the HELP feature and from the friendly tone in the letter I think they will listen.

So give them a try and they also refer you to partner directories and that is a cool thing.

Rosie

• Podcast directory
• Blog tools
• Battle of blogs
• Blog rental
• Plus lots more

Each site is manually reviewed and they promise a decision in 48-72 hours. There seems to be a lot of opportunities to surf other sites . The guidelines must be read carefully. They are strict but fair with their requirements. I applaud them for their attention to detail and concern about quality.

Rosie

If you do not know your RSS feed you can always get an account with feedburner.com and they will create a feed for you in seconds. If you don’t know what I am talking about click on the category RSS for some earlier postings.

There is a request that you either link to them or place a graphic button on your blog. For those of you new at doing this it is called reciprocal link exchange. Please observe that I placed the link for this site directly in the phrase link to them.

For those who are new to this I created the link by highlighting the words and then clicking on the box on the tool bar that looks like a chain. I clicked on the chain image and a box came up. In the box I pasted the link I copied on the directory site.

A little bit more about the directory Weblogalot. Once you submit your site RSS you can then place the code they provide into your blog software so that every time you post something new to your blog it is automatically pinged by your blogging software.

Now, that is a mouth fill. I can tell you that for WordPress.org and WordPress.com you can go into the OPTIONS panel then the WRITING tab. Scroll down to the section that says Update Services. In that wide box you can key in the places you want to be pinged every time you bost. And a ping is just a message that is sent to the sites to say, “Hey, some new stuff is up on this blog. Check it out!”

Also, this directory is really good about showing recent blog entries , breaking news and an archive. So I think this will be worth our time to submit our sites. Don’t forget to link back to them.

Rosie

Just wanted to let you know that you should expect this if you join. Many directories require this step. This is another site that has humans approving the entry of the blogs. So be patient with the acceptance or rejection of your submission. Stay tuned as more develops.

Rosie

Has anyone else used this directory?

You cannot access the user panel until your site is approved. But looking at the sites listed this directory provides a good amount of statistics and opportunity to rank the sites.

I have just submitted my site  so I will know more once I am approved. I do not know if the directory will allow you to submit more than one site but will know more later.

If anyone already has some experience with this directory let us know.

Rosie

Now the exciting thing is that this directory gets right to the point and asks you to submit your site. This user friendly interface provides another way for your blog to get indexed and increase your ranking in the directory.

The directory also allows you to browse for the most cool, most popular and highly rated. Now get ready for the shocking news. THERE ARE ONLY 10 SITES THAT ARE SHOWN WHEN YOU SEARCH ON BOOMER!

In addition, none of them are rated. So I spent time rating each and every one of them. And If any of you have an opportunity please submit your site and make sure it is rated. Plus rate the others.
Once you submit your site you are taken to another page that allows you to quickly generate a password and user name. STOP, write it in your password book. Key in the name of the site and url starting with that famous http:///.

After you give a description of your site it is suggested that you copy the link to blogarama and place it somewhere on your site f or better ranking in the directory.

It does not tell you where to put the link. You can put it into one of your text widgets. Or you can place your blogarama link here: Blogarama

I switched from the visual view to the code view in my blog and pasted the link directly after the word here.

Finally, you can submit articles that are related to blogging. I really stumbled upon it. This is the page link. 

So yes, check this directory out, post some articles and get folks to rate your blog!!! This directory has oodles of potential. The goal will be to get that site submitted and raise the number to 68,000 by the end of the month???

Rosie