23. Zeus (Arelis et al) and internet directories. Be WARNED

I will sing of Zeus, chief among the gods and the greatest, all-seeing, the lord of all, the fulfiller who whispers words of wisdom Colin L. (Sixth Grade Latin, Zeus Myth)

Zeus, also known as the God of Thunder, is well known within the SEO community and is highly favored by many. It has been around for quite some time and was designed to do a specific job of collecting valid link information (websites matching keyword based criteria) and then using the data as a basis for automated e-mailing for reciprocal link requests.

Zeus also creates very effective, attractive and VERY special directories BUT its use since I first came across it long ago has been greatly abused and it is not something I would recommend anybody interested in ranking highly for such directories on any major search engine. They have been used on a large scale to spam all major search engines and especially Google. I have left this chapter exactly as written because in principle the software has good use opportunities too.

I no longer use any of these systems for the simple reason even when used for good legitimate reasons they leave a trail that a search engine can spot and it is conceivable that all my work could be penalized.

Zeus is a robot. It is a software program that once instructed and trained will go and find websites that match set criteria you set the criteria, which are basically important keywords.

Once started it will just keep going and going until it runs out of links to follow. Zeus thus finds and follows links to highly relevant sites.

If for example Zeus was programmed to find sites, which were highly likely to be good garden related sites and if you started it off at say greatgardenlinks.com (imaginary site) it would go to every site linked from greatgardenlinks.com . It would then systematically go to every new site linked from every site it found on all the other sites until it ran out of links hope this makes sense. This process can go on for a long time if you let it you can of course always step in and stop the robot.

You have a large degree of control as to how fast and how selective the process of getting good sites is carried out.

Zeus adds each relevant site to its data base of sites that matched the criteria set. For example and purely as a simplified example lets say you told Zeus you were only interested in sites where the following words appeared:

> Gardening

> Garden plants

> Garden

> Shrubs

> Trees

> Petunias

> Daffodils

> etc until you had say a list of 100 words all together

You would have also given a relative importance to each word so that the more important the word the higher would its value be if a page containing it was found.

As Zeus progresses in its search it finds a page with the words. It counts each word and multiplies by the number assigned. By the time it has finished with the website it would have a total score for the site, which it stores on its database. The higher the total the better the website theoretically.

As Zeus did all this searching and computing it also looked for all the e-mail addresses on the site and recorded these in its database.

You can imagine the amount of valuable information collected.

In very simplified terms this information is sorted by human intervention (i.e. YOU) into categories of gardening so that a directory of gardening sites is created automatically by Zeus within which each site is ranked by the total score the higher the score the higher in the directory listing that site will sit.

This is very important work as you will see soon.

The following screen shot is of the directory created for my water gardening project. The layout is arranged by Zeus.

You now have a list of websites in a directory and you have the email addresses associated with each site. The challenge is to now seek reciprocal links and Zeus helps a great deal here.

Clicking on a link in the above directory would return a page of SERPs like the one below. Again all the layout work and organization of this web page is done by Zeus automatically once set up to do so.

Imagine if you could send an e-mail to all those sites Zeus found telling them that they have received a link to their site from the imaginary newmagicgardeninglinksite.com (using my site above as the example) ranked at Google which they can view by clicking a link in the e-mail. This might just please the recipient and encourage a reciprocal link this request of course would be included in the e-mail since this is the whole purpose of the exercise. The request would also be accompanied by all the instructions required to create the link you are seeking to get.

Follow up systems and mechanisms for checking if reciprocal links have been obtained are built into the software.

The software is very powerful and includes its own browser and an ability to personalize each e-mail with respect to the individual site collected.

This chapter is a very brief introduction to a tool that if used correctly and consistently will greatly improve your attempts to get reciprocal listings with similar sites. It will also remove 90% of the drudgery associated with seeking reciprocal links while also creating a very useful directory resource. It will create large volumes of traffic for you.

Zeus has been used for spamming purposes and has created problems for Google in the past. Google however is very much aware of the ability of the software and the real intent behind it. The developers of Zeus have introduced systems to reduce significantly the likelihood that Zeus will be effectively used to spam the engines.

BUT THERES MORE (DONT YOU LOVE THIS PHRASE?) .

One of the great things that Zeus does and I have never seen this explained well and it leads me to believe that perhaps this great benefit of Zeus is not truly appreciated.

Even in the Zeus manual this advantage is alluded to but it not explained well enough in my opinion. I will explain using examples. Take a look at my directory as of November 2002.

The first thing to notice is that it highly themed i.e. all about water gardening in one form or another. This is a very important factor to remember when using Zeus create tight specific targeted topics for the directory.

If I click on any one of the links in the directory a web page comes up. Lets click garden Ponds and this is what we see (there are more than 20 links but here we show only 4):

Now this website does not look very special until you notice the Title and description. Since you might not be able to see the information very well on the picture take a look at the HTML below:

INSERT HTML

Notice that the Title contains the keyword garden ponds. This is an important keyword in my own project. Notice also that the description and keyword meta tags also contain this important keyword. Also notice that the text on the page is about garden ponds and similar subjects.

In essence what we have is a well-designed quite well optimized search engine friendly web page.

The magic it was created automatically by the God of Thunder, Zeus.

In fact Zeus created 43 (1 for each directory listing) well-designed quite well optimized search engine friendly web pages.

Because the number of directory listings is entirely up to the YOU, the Zeus user, as many web pages as you like can be created automatically. You also choose the names of the directories and thus the ability to choose good keywords.

It is from these optimized web pages that traffic will automatically be drawn to your site.

Now Zeus is well worth a book on its own and I have skimmed the surface here. Hopefully the power has been demonstrated and you know why the software is called ..

In summary:

> Zeus finds highly targeted links

> Zeus finds the e-mail addresses from the highly targeted web pages

> Zeus sends out with intervention from yourself appealing letters requesting reciprocal links

> Zeus builds attractive directories automatically

> Zeus bases the directory listing on good SEO principles, which almost guarantee search engine traffic you will normally see this traffic emerging anytime after about 3 months based upon my experience. This traffic also comes to a highly specific themed directory pointing to excellent resources . If you have done the job properly in the first place.