Is directory submission still a good SEO practice?
friends, please tell me still the google directory submission useful for increase our PR. I've heard since there are a thousands of out going links in a directory the weight you gain from a directory backlink is very low. Do you agree? please comment.

This and similar questions about the topic of directories and their SEO value comes up on the forums quite often.  People new to internet marketing techniques usually associate good SEO with PageRank and while not unrelated one can not base their efforts on pagerank alone.

I have a game site http://www.gamesonline4free.net on which I do lots of experiments. It currently has a PageRank of 0 due to Google's penalizing it. Here is the reason: 6 months ago it was a PR4 but that was also the time that I decided to experiment with the Digital Point CO-OP network and the TNX network. DP CO-OP is essentially a link exchange network that serves links on your site and serves your backlinks in other's sites. TNX is more like a paid links network.

There is a lot of buzz in 2008 around Social Media Marketing; a lot more than there was in 2007. Lots of organizations and individuals are experimenting on the possibilities of social media and networking sites as a means to drive traffic to their sites.

There is no secret ingredient !!!

Social media and their on-line participants behave mostly like communities and their members behave off-line; but many people still fail to see it.

Imagine you make a search with your favorite search engine about "keyword phrase 1" and you visit the first result (1st URL) but you return immediately to the search results - using search engine terms you bounce back. You now click on the 2nd URL and you never return to the search results. Lets say the same exact thing happens with 1000 other users searching for "keyword phrase 1";   What should that search engine conclude ? The 2nd URL is more fit to be on the 1st position for "keyword phrase 1". The 1st URL might not even be fit in for displaying in the first page of the search results of that search !!

Giorgos' recent post on link exchanges using LinkEx generated a few questions about the value of link exchanges. I thought it might be interesting to revisit some signs of quality links and then discuss where link exchanges might make sense when acquiring links.

Let me first say link exchanges are far from my preferred source of links. Google has made it pretty clear they don't care for these kind of changes and while that doesn't mean all link exchanges are bad, mass reciprocal linking is generally frowned upon as a useful seo tactic. I've never engaged in link exchange networks and have no plans on doing so in the near future. Still there can be times when it makes sense to reciprocate a link and there can be times when a direct trade of links is perfectly natural. Think trackbacks for an example of a natural reciprocal link.