Net Sieve

Decent web directories that you can submit your sites to are getting pretty rare. Either they want a couple hundred dollars for each submission or what they have to offer for free is worthless. Sometimes listing your links at these sites can actually be harmful to your rankings instead of helpful. If you’re looking for a free web directory, you should look at Dirmania.

DirMania is a business web directory that provides free website advertising. The site has a PR 3, if you care about that kind of stuff and offers a direct link to your small or medium sized business/website. The directory is organized by categories and is very search engine friendly. Your listing can go live in less than 24 hours if you meet the listing requirements. (Not hard to do if you don’t try keyword stuffing or other lame 2002 tricks.) Be sure and provide a good, human friendly description of your site with appropriate keywords and a catchy title and you’re in.

The submission form has all the instructions and advice you need to determine if your submission is quality or not. Think common sense. Make sure you are submitting your link in the most relevant category to its content and make sure that the content is offering something useful to the visitor. It is, isn’t it? Then you’re good - otherwise, anything that is submitted to a blatantly wrong category or is nothing but spam will be removed from the directory.

Play by the rules and scoop up some link love. We all need it.

Need to up the position of your sites? Why do I ask these questions? Of course you do. Hop on the backlink bandwagon and boost yourself up, baby.

Simply use this Backlink Tools page, which has “links to the best Backlink Tools on the internet and these tools will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher. The following Backlink Tools links are selected from the top SEO tool web sites. These Backlink Tools links are the best of the best.”

You heard it.

Want to see yourself as others see you? Or at least how search engines see your pages? SEOmoz’s crawl test tool is open to the public.

This tool is used to test how accessible your site is to search engines and can help you quickly diagnose potential crawling issues and give you an overview of your site’s search friendliness.

To run the crawl test tool you just need to register for a free SEOmoz account. Basic members are limited to one report per 24 hour period and the tool will only test 5 pages at a time. Premium Members can run as many reports as they like and the crawl test will test 50 pages at a time.

Knock yerself out.

It’s been a few minutes since my last Conspiracy Theory posts, so I naturally couldn’t resist this bit of the news.

Honest to Google, the first thing I thought was “Wow, who would benefit from making ad serving so dangerous? Now, webmasters will have to go through ‘highly trusted’ ad servers like those Google could provide … Wait a minute!”

Now before you think I’ve finally gone the way of the UFO abductionists, think about the Big G’s latest bitch slap to every site that dared to run text link ads that were not Google’s. I say if it walks like a Chupacabra and sucks blood like a Chupacabra, it’s a Chupacabra.

If you’re looking to buy a new big ticket item like home appliances - and you’re like 75 percent of shoppers - you do most of your searching and comparison shopping online, then buy offline. Does that mean you’ll easily find what you’re looking for in the main search engines? Unfortunately not.

Search engines can’t effectively find and deliver results relevant to your location and budget. Sure, they can show you what the big box store have in stock, but that doesn’t really help with local stores and specific products.

Enter the Krillion Localization Engine™. Whether your looking for home appliances like Whirlpool Washing Machines or maybe a Sony flat panel television, you’ll find what you want, where you need it with Krillion search.

Dammit Jerry, you’re making it very hard for us to trust your company more than we used to trust Google. What’s all this with China? You guys step into the country and then evil just exudes from your pores?

I have to put you in my New Category that I thought was going to reserved for one search engine alone.

OK, it’s clear that I’m a Craigslist geek and I’m always looking for ways to enhance the experience. We all know it’s not the easiest site to keep up with.

craig2mail.com is a great site to have selected searches sent to your email whenever an item or post matches your search criteria. There’s only one downside - if it really is a downside, I haven’t decided yet - you can only set up one search per email. They say:

This site is NOT owned by or affiliated with craigslist.org. This site is simply a tool to do automatic craigslist searches made by a guy who spent too much time manually searching craigslist and still always got beat to the good stuff. I like Ebay but in many ways craigslist is better. One function that Ebay has that’s really great is the ability to get email notifications when something you want is advertised. For those of you who haven’t figured it out already…that is what this site is about. Submit a craigslist search and we send you an email notification every time a matching ad is posted to craigslist. You will get a copy of the ads text in your email and if it is something you want all you have to do is click the link at the bottom of the email to go straight to craigslist where you can contact the post’s author.

craig2mail.com has a strict spam policy. They don’t. Give it a try.

I just hit on a helpful little site - iTools.com - offering a nice search package in a compact space. iTools gives you “quick access to the best Internet tools” including:

• map tools
• financial tools
• search tools
• language tools
• research tools
• and, yes, even more.

When I hit up the research tools, I found a search for legal definitions, Nolo’s Law Encyclopedia, About.com, newspapers, biographies… and on. I’m spending more time here. Nice work

For some reason, Craig-o doesn’t like this sort of thing, so grab it-use it-love it before it gets shut down.

Global Craigslist Search Engine

You can search for terms in different catagories; jobs, for sale, lonely geek seeking lonely geek (OK, I made that one up.) with specific search words. Now tell me Craig, what’s so bad about that?

People Search and Public Record Toolbar Version 1.0 of our popular free people search and public record menu for Firefox contains dozens of the web’s most popular and powerful free people search and public record sites.
(Note - ignore the comments and mud-slinging on this page. Someone has it in for this developer. I’ve had the tool on for about a week now and haven’t had a single issue. It’s a great resource.)

This Firefox extension is a handy menu tool for investigators, reporters, legal professionals, real estate agents, online researchers
and anyone interested in doing their own basic people searches and public record lookups as well as background research.

Find past friends, relatives, classmates, coworkers, military buddies or do background research on people and businesses.

This useful extension offers you the following free people and public record searches at the click of a mouse –

- Free People Searches: White Pages, 411, DA Plus, Zaba Search, Zoom Info, Google, International Phone Directories, Google Image Search and
Riya photo search.

- Reverse Phone Numbers: White Pages, DA Plus, Google, Land Line or Cell Phone? Search, Reverse Payphone and Do Not Call List.

- Reverse Addresses: White Pages, DA Plus, Google, Mail Drop Search and Whois Lookup.

- Area Code, Zip Code and International Calling Code Searches.

- Yellow Pages & Local Searches: White Pages Yellow, DA Plus Yellow, Google Local and Yahoo Local.

- Public Record Searches: Skipease Public Record Directory, Search Systems Public Record Directory, Social Security Number Searches, NETRonline Property Records, Zillow Property Values, Trulia Real Estate Search, Yahoo Real Estate and NACO US County Information.

- Criminal Searches: Inmate Locators and National Sex Offender Registry.

- Maps & Satellites: Google Maps, Map Quest, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth, Terra Server.

- Government Phone Directories: US Blue Pages, Canada GEDS.

- US Government Search Engines: FirstGov and Google Government Search.

- News & Blog Searches: Google News, Yahoo News, Technorati, IceRocket and Google Blog Search.

- Business & Finance: Alibaba, Business.com, Thomas Registry, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance.

- Jobs & Classifieds: Indeed Meta Job Search, Simply Hired Meta Job Search, Dice Jobs, Hot Jobs, Monster Jobs, Craigslist Classifieds.

- Social Network Sites: Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Tribe, Xanga.