Directories of sites have been around near enough as long as the internet has.
Yahoo started life as a directory and still has one although it doesn’t promote it much nowadays. You can find it at here but personally I don’t think it’s worth the $299 annual fee.
The Open Directory is another directory. It’s free but the amount of time it takes to get accepted varies from soon-ish to never.
When you’re posting articles, some should go on your website to help attract search engine traffic and others should go on a variety of article directories to get you extra inbound links.
Some people will make articles do “double duty” by posting them on their own website as well as article directories. I tend not to do that but, if that’s a route you want to go down, make sure that your site includes the various tags so that Google knows you’re the author. If you’ve got a picture in your Google+ profile there’s even a chance that will show up in the search results next to the result, which is useful for drawing attention to you in the results.
Google indexes lots of different things – words, images, videos. It manages to do this very well with words and sort-of OK with images and videos.
The trouble with images and videos is that it hasn’t got the computational power to deal with that. The last figure I read said that YouTube gets 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. That’s 4,320 days worth of video uploaded every single day. That takes a lot of processing.
Internet marketing covers lots of different topics. Essentially it deals anything that could affect the number of people visiting your site and how they manage to find you.
In the days before the internet, David Ogilvy famously said “50% of all advertising is useless. We just don’t know which 50%.”
Weirdly – despite all the tracking available – we actually know a lot less about how effective any marketing is.
Sure, we can measure direct visitors to our sites. There are all sorts of log analysis programs to do that ranging from Google Analytics through to programs like Webalizer and AWStats and even the “raw” access logs. But they don’t tell the whole story.