Site Review Blog

No matter what your business is it won’t be much without advertising.  You could spend hundreds (or even thousands) and get a listing in your Yellow pages business directory or you could speend your adversting dollars much smarter.  Getting your business website known will mean getting it listed in as many business directories as possible.  Yopu will probably seek out free to submit, paid to submit and every other business directory that you can find a relevant category on.  You could choose a free directory and then choose to pay a small amount to get a featured listing to make your listing more prominent and always on the first page of the results.

Visit www.businessedirectory.com

No longer do you need to be a multi-millionare megalomaniac to own your own country - you can make your mark in the virtual world and Buy a nation of your own. Now you are probably wondering why anyone would want to buy even a virtual nation and the answer is simple.

You get to own the nation on a world map that links to your website. Not only do you get a link, but you can also put a picture on the map to represent your country.

Yes, over the last few years we have seen pixel advertising sites the first was the Million Dollar site, but this has to be one of the most exciting and innovative Plxel sites since the first.

I am currently looking at some of the smaller nations and considering buying one myself!

Visit www.buyanation.com

Wow, that is a pretty big claim isn’t it. The new MasterMOZ Directory is making a stand with some great innovations that have the real potential to make it the most accurate (and useful) directory around. Sure, we have looked at other directories in the past and your first question, like mine is probably what makes this one so unique immediately followed by how can they claim to be the most accurate! Well, after just a couple of minutes looking, the answer to both questions can be found.

The MasterMOZ directory is unlike any other, but similar to all. It has a totally different paradigm for a listing. First, you sign up for a free account, then you are eligible to immediately make a listing. In order to test this out, We signed up and created a listing and yes, the listing was available immediately!

With such a system in place you might think that is is open to abuse and that everyone will sign up and add all sorts of spammy sites. Well, that is true BUT the listing is unlikely to stay around for very long. You see, the power of this directory is that with a free account, you can only list a single site. Every single member can add a rating, review and comment about every site listed. This means that a listing that is not accurate will gain a lot of negative feedback by other people listing in the same category! In addition to this, there are reviewers in each category who will flag any in-appropriate listings. If a listing is flagged the Author will have 14 days to correct it otherwise it will be removed from the directory.

Of course, we signed up and tested it. It was simple and only took a couple of minutes to sign up and create a listing. As far as the site goes, it looks similar to other directories so it is easy to use. The members page gives you info about your listings along with details about upgrading your account so you can list more sites.

They have put together a directory that is a bit different which I hope gets the support of the Webmaster community and grows to be a useful directory that lives up to the claims.

Visit www.mastermoz.com

Technorati Tags: directory

… online that is. Yes, we have looked at a few online shopping sites over the last couple of months, but today we are looking at what is essentially the mall. Well, first of all, we need to understand that all a mall is - it is nothing more than a huge building with a lot of smaller shops inside. So my analogy of an online shopping directory being a mall is right on the mark - it is just a “building” with lots of “shops” in it - regardless of the fact that it is all virtual.

So, what does an electronic commerce mall do? Simple, just like a regular mall it puts Internet stores in the same place so you can wander thru them all - just like walking thru a regular mall. Just like a regular mall it has shops for finding various items - such as Books, health and Pets. You can wander around each category and then visit each store by selecting a category from the main page. You can even put your own store into this “mall” by following the submission guidelines.

As we have discovered, nearly all directories have multiple submission categories - Elib has a basic submission which is free and also a couple of paid options for inclusion. The site itself is nothing special to look at, but it offers something that I have not seen in a directory before - an additional 2 languages being Dutch and Italian. By having a website that is in multiple languages you have the chance to cater for and capture a larger number of potential visitors. Whilst I cannot read either of the additional languages to verify if it is all the same, the layout looks very similar and I can guess the occasional word. Next time I build a website I am definately going to look into how easy or difficult it is to add another language. I think this is a great Idea.

Visit www.elib.org

One of the best things about taking a few minutes to check out online resources before going shopping is that sometimes you can get unbeleivable deals - the rest of the time you should seek out a Coupon and get from a few $ to a few % off the full retail price.

Couponchief is a directory with a difference, you see they don’t list websites they list discount coupons and offers from a whole heap of places. They have a heap of merchants listed that offer coupon codes and to make it easy to find a particular item they also have the coupons listed by category. The website is easy to navigate and easy to use. I just clicked on the first merchant in the Merchant list bestbuy.com and there were a heap of discount codes offering things like free shipping, $50 off and 10 to 15% off various items.

For Regular visitors you can simply click on the new offers link at the top of the page to see what has been updated within the last day or so. So, forget paying full retail and before you shop find a coupon.

Visit www.couponchief.com

… Cheetah Find. Cheetah Find is a Web Directory. Yes, we have reviewed a few other directories in the past, and at a first glance the Cheetah directory is not that different from most other directories. It has categories and sub-categories, it offres free and paid submissions. It has a reasonable number of links in it -like you would expect.

Ok, I’ll cut to the chase - the focus of this directory is free stuff.  On the main page of the site, the Free Categories are the ones that are featured, and all other categories are “almost hidden”  in a small box - and a small font for the links!  With Frebies from graphics, hit counters and web templates there is a pretty good collection of freebies that most webmasters wopuld find useful.  Then when looking again, the site has a nav bar right at the top that links to the Web Directory and all of the other Freebies.

To start with, I had trouble identifying the directory script that runs this directory, but after carefully looking around I finally guessed it was using phpLD.  Now, what made it so hard was the fact that the site looks like no other directory I have ever seen.  Next to every category, there is a little graphic that is in some way representative of the category.  The visual appeal of the main categories page is just soo much better than any other directory I have looked at.  I really wish that everyone who used a common script took the time and effort to actually make it look different rather than being just a clone (or nearly) of the default template that comes with the script.

visit www.cheetahfind.com

Everyone who runs a website desires to rank high in the Search engine Results.  To get a site ranking high can take a lot of time, effort and knowledge.  There are several people who document their experience and steps taken to acheive these results.  The Ituloy AngSulong Blog falls into this area.

Now If you are like me, you are probably wondering what the term Ituloy AngSulong is all about but a quick look at this Blog and all is revealed.  The Term was chosen as a unique phrase for an SEO Contest.  The Idea of an SEO contest was a bit foreign to me but a quick read and all was revealed.  The Idea of the contest is to get a particular site to feature high in the SERPS (Search engine Results pages) in a fixed amount of time - usually 3 to 6 months.  At the end of the Contest prizes are awarded to the site owners for the sites that are in certain places in the SERPS.  I didn’t realise that such contests were popular and with prizes for some contests being several thousand dollars, no wonder they are popular!

Now the BlueSEO Blog is not just about the contest, but I guess at the moment it is a fairly high priority.  The posts read ok, and the info within them seems pretty sound.  The  Philippine Weblog gets fairly regular updates, which is what you expect from a blog.  They also have a web directory as part of their site.

The site itself is using Wordpress for the Blog and phpLD for the directory and they have done a pretty good job integrating the design so both the blog and directory look the same.  Quite often, sites use several different scripts but all too frequently they look different, but they have ensured that all parts of their site look the same.

Visit www.blueseo.com