The
Sioux-Empire.com has just been upgraded to a full blown regional resource locator and listings directory.
Sioux-Empire.com went live today at 9:00 AM Central Time. With the emphasis on local community search,
Domain Hostmaster has sponsored this new local area search engine and regional directory to offer its own community an inexpensive alternative to the outrageous rates being charged by other area local directories without any actual traffic to send advertisers.
I was astonished when Yahoo started charging $299.00 for a directory listing. To me, that's quite a tough sell, and Yahoo has millions of visitors. But when a local directory which doesn't even offer a search engine optimized directory and has almost no traffic of any significance offered to sell me a listing on its poorly designed site for over $450.00 per year, I realized that there are now rip-off artists on the local scene trying to seperate good Sioux Empire citizens from their hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, some are actually falling for this highway robbery, as many are not well educated about the web and internet advertising rates.
The truth is that $50.00 per year is extortion unless the website that you are going to be advertising on can prove that your listing will be displayed in front of at least a million people in the same time frame. Part of the reason is that unless you are listed first, or at least in the top five, your link is pretty much worthless.
To further complicate things, links have to be built just right in order for them to even mean anything to any of the search engines that crawl websites tabulating links as votes. The reason is that, because links which point back to databases (instead of the actual site, usually as a lazy programming method of keeping track of the click-throughs to an advertiser's website) are absolutely worthless. In fact, Google had an extremely serious problem that allowed such linking methods that generated a 301 error to steal traffic from the website that it was linked to. Only this year, when a whole new Googlebot showed up and started crawling pages built on the Mozilla FireFox browser engine, was this serious error finally put to bed. That is, IF there are no remnants of the old GoogleBot crawler in action, which is built on the ancient text-based browser, Lynx.
On top of this, some webmasters attach the "nofollow" tag to link anchor tags, and Google has verified that it will not take such links into account, and will not tally such links as a vote for a site.
Now, throw into this mix the fact that a text link is always better than a banner link. Why? Because search engines can't read the contents of a graphic. They can read text because they can monitor the keystrokes that textual content is built on. But it will be some time before Google will be able to read images, Flash animations or video. While we fully expect Google and Yahoo to utilize implementions of new standards for video coding technologies to describe scenes or shots, this type of technology has to incorporated into the actual video in order to be useful. We already enjoy such technology for images with the ALT property of the IMG tag in HTML, but this tag has already been degraded by dishonest use due to spammers stuffing the tag with keywords.
Fortunately, almost all of the directories I run (
Reciprocate Links!,
Worthful.Info,
Dir.SiouxFalls-SD.com,
Sioux-Empire.com,
httpmaster &
Worldwide Host Info) are completely search engine optimized and reward listing submitters who go the extra mile to list their services with me. There is another old one that I am still working on which is very powerful which I will be posting about here in my SEO blog soon, too.
As soon as its ready for prime-time. But these others are, now, and well worth the investment or effort required to be listed. In fact, I guarantee it!
But this brings the post full circle. This is why I have established the
Sioux-Empire.com Regional Directory, to give good, honest businessmen and businesswomen a fair and honest means of extending their market reach with affordable online advertising that won't put them, or their business, in the poor house. Furthermore, this type of reasonable advertising is actually quite common, and there is no reason that the Sioux Empire should suffer at the hands of these internet highwaymen.
And this is the very reason that
Domain Hostmaster is sponsoring this directory, as well, to deliver quality services at a great price-point in order to do an honest business with good people. And, to give something back to its own community, as well.
Sioux-Empire.com Search engine crawler friendly, keyword optimized, family oriented regional business directory serving the city of Sioux Falls and the surrounding Sioux Empire area in southeastern South Dakota. The
Sioux Empire Regional Resource Directory only accepts quality website submissions which clearly define a purpose that is relevant to the regional community and then follows through on that promise.
It's about time! -Doug
