Visit http://www.robertcrumbcartoons.com which was launched last December 9. Has attained a PR3 and also manually submitted it to a couple hundred directories of which 60 or so have listed it. Since it is about a person in general, I am curious as to why it hasn't elevated in the results for actual name of person (which is in title tags) and I optimized / minimized what I could within the other tags. Or, do these things just take time?
First of all, don't get hung up on Pagerank. As you can see, whether it's a 3 or a 0 it doesn't mean a thing if you're not ranking for the keywords you want. Secondly, did you target the name of the person (Robert Crumb) in the anchor text of the acual links you created pointing back to the site? That's where it will really help you with specific keyword ranking. And with 778,000 competitors ranking for the term "Robert Crumb," it won't happen overnight. And finally, as you can also see, links from directories aren't worth much. Google clearly recognizes them as link farms with little or not link value being passed to the target page (yours). Keep developing backlinks, but don't waste your time with directories.
Thank you itcn. Much appreciated. As you mentioned, page rank means nothing and I do realize it. I mention it though, because the site was launched only 7 months ago and has an actual ranking so I know it's in the index. I realized something else as you point out....DIRECTORY LISTINGS AREN'T IMPORTANT. I spent a better portion of last winter registering many sites to hundreds of directories (manually) and to date - NOTHING. Those that accepted my URLs have't helped a bit. Secondly and to re-verify then, I think creating an actual ANCHOR TEXT in the back links is what I really need to focus on. I.e. the one-way text back links. And perhaps since I own several other sites, I could go into the html and put a title="" behind the URL in between the <> tags to give it more "juice". Good point! Thank you.
Definitely! It's a good idea to use both title and anchor text for keywords, for example: <a href="..." title="Robert Crumb">Robert Crumb</a> Code (markup): However; they don't have to both be the same. You can use different keywords for title than anchor text. Finally, submit your content pages to social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon (you should submit all your cartoon pages to Stumble, they should do well there), etc. You'll have more luck with these sites than directories.