For the past few weeks, I have been working on the suggestions in the Website Grader report to improve search engine ranking. In the Off-Page SEO section of the report, besides the all-important inbound links number, there are two seemingly relevant items: being listed in dmoz and in the Yahoo! Directory.

I started with dmoz, as it was referred to as “the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”, which sounded impressive to me. For some reason I found it hard to define the category for my blog; finally, I chose Business: Marketing and Advertising: Internet Marketing: Marketing Services as the best fit. Unfortunately, dmoz does not acknowledge a submission and they do not offer any alternate method to follow-up on it, hence the only thing to do is wait. But as of today, waiting has not worked and my blog has not been listed. I guess I could try again, as suggested in this interesting article on the subject.

As for the Yahoo! Directory, I shunned from it after I found out there is a substantial fee for their service ($299 is substantial to me). Instead, I opted for submitting my blog URL for free to Yahoo! Search.

Other actions I have taken after the suggestions in the report: I have added the Alexa traffic rank button to my blog (there is nothing to brag about my rank just yet) and submitted one article to Digg; I bookmarked on del.icio.us myself, maybe something I should not have done…  I also added the Twitter Follow Me button to the side. The little blue bird looks good there, I think.

A rather puzzling statement from Website Grader is the one about “Too many images found”. There is not much to do except for ignoring it: the pictures I have are the gravatars of the top commentators and the image for the e-book cover in the opt-in form. They stay!

One thing that has botehred me a bit is that I could not get the Website Grader badge to show my updated grade after all the above actions (it got up to 82). Since I could not establish the root cause, I decided to remove it. Something similar happened with the Alexa rank button, but this one updates automatically now. I might give the badge a second chance…

There is always more that can be done but I think I have addressed the Website Grader report sufficiently. I should now go back to focus on getting links and continue commenting on other blogs.

Gosh! It took me too long to post again…

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