Maybe you are a Doctor or a lawyer. You’ve built an excellent
web site that looks good, has the potential to make huge sales
and is well optimised for the search engines. You have arranged
a large number of reciprocal links, you have submitted to all
the free directories you could find and submitted articles
wherever you could. Now it’s time to sit down, relax and wait
for the traffic to come flooding in? NO.

As the internet expands it is becoming harder and harder for
even the most excellent of web sites to rank well with the
search engines. These days it would appear that getting a large
number of quality backlinks, with good anchor text, is not a do
once and forget operation. Your competitors are out there
building links daily so you must keep up.

With the huge and growing number of people online looking for
goods and services amongst the mass of related websites, niche
directories are coming into play.

Niche directories are usually much smaller and have far fewer
listings than regular paid directories and are almost without
doubt a lot slimmer than the mass of free directories on the
internet. As a webmaster, this is great news as it makes gaining
a good, relevant and visible link to your site a lot easier. For
visitors, your potential customers, a niche directory offers a
handy way of finding what they are looking for quickly and
easily.

Although there may be a small cost in submitting to niche
directories, their benefit to your site can potentially be huge,
offering far greater ROI than, say, a Yellow pages advert or
more expensive advertising on a large web site in your genre.

If you feel it is time to gain a Niche Listing for your
site then here is a handy categorised list of Niche
Directories

Regardless of the type of site you have, whether it is purely informational or a full blown e-commerce site, it is always worth budgeting for subscription fees to the strong directories. The sites where you have to pay a fee to be able to list them have that fee for a reason; they are widely used, and often have an in-house marketing team working full time to manage the site. This means they can filter any spam out, and can take the time to review each site that wants to be listed to filter out the poor quality ones, and ensure their site only lists credible, desirable sites. Also, your site will be reviewed as to its suitability and accepted into the directory listings quicker than with non subscription sites, as they will often have large backlogs of sites waiting for approval. As a result, they run the risk of becoming a link farm – something search engines such as Google pay no attention to, and are, in actual fact, illegal. Possibly the biggest advantage when using a paid directory is that they attract the heaviest traffic – they themselves spend money on ensuring they are high up in the search engine rankings, and are popular sites to visit themselves. This is then transferred to the sites they are listing, as customers are more likely to trust their content.

By working through the top 100 or so directories and subscribing to each one can set you back around a couple of thousands pounds, but you mustn’t forget that this is a one off cost, that will ensure your listing among the top sites for life. The security and guarantee of traffic these sites have makes them a good option to take when looking at ways to promote your business online.

As we already know, having a high number of back links featured on other sites is the bets way to ensure search engines are aware of your site and to boost your site up in the rankings. Therefore registering with a site such Stongestlinks.com is a sensible way to manage your links, and to ensure all the links you have are relevant. Browsers and visitors to sites get very frustrated if the links they click on do not direct them to where they expected it to, so it is important to make sure you only have back links on sites relevant to your area of business.

Probably the most important thing to remember when budgeting for online marketing is that not all of the money should be spent in one area, such as article directories subscription fees, but should be spread out to achieve an even cover – writing and submitting articles, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation on the actual site by experienced web designers, etc. These should all be included in the marketing mix, because not all search engines use the same methods when ranking pages, and above all the internet is still a relatively new world, and trends are liable to change.

I’ve been doing some thinking about directories and how they’ve managed to get around the problem of selling links. The funny part is they do it while not trying to hide the fact that there only purpose is getting you backlinks. You can go to any SEO forum and get a list of directories along with their PR.

There are websites dedicated to checking and letting you know which directories are search engine friendly (another words pass PR) and companies dedicated to getting you as many links while altering the anchor text and descriptions to get the maxima benefit out of the directories.

The only time anyone uses a directory is when they are looking to add backlinks to their site. How many directories have you gone to and said, MAN, this directory is so good I’m going to bookmark it?

A good link is one that brings good traffic and visitors that do something you desire while on your website. Blog comments, forum posting, photo sharing and other social media sites can send these types of visitors but I’ve never seen anyone say submit your site to this directory for the traffic.

I do submit my site to directories but what unique value do I get from these directories? None or at least this is my own observation. However I submit my sites to directories for the backlinks they can send my site and in turn boost my PR and my ranking in the search engines.

Google says buying links are bad yet directories continue to sell them. How is it that directories get around the algo tweaks while real sites continue having to make changes to keep Google happy?

Google has stated that paid links should not pass PR, so in all fairness should paid directory links pass PR?

Google has forced blogging platforms to add nofollow tags to their software as well as sites like W3C and Wikipedia and others to add nofollow tags to all outgoing links. I’ve also recently heard that Google has figured out a way not to count links coming from blogrolls, yet directories continue to sell links and pass PR.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining and I enjoy the boost in PR that directories send. However I have to wonder if I should be worried about a future algo tweak that could very well discount the links coming from directories. Or do directories somehow have a special place in Google’s heart that allows them to break rules that other sites have to obey?

This article will guide you the importance of directories submissions in launching a new site, or ranking an existing one. I am going to review 6 important areas.

Directories are the “brand new site” best friend.
Since every new domain gets put in the Google “TrustBox”, since they favor links from trusted sites. This is a part of the “TrustRank” equation within the algorithm. Directories play a very important roll in getting good quality inbound links that help your site to get out. As they pass PageRank and reputation with Google, your site will greatly benefit from its inclusion in these directories, especially in the launching phase of its life cycle. So, finding solid directories to get your site listed is the key.

The viable alternative to link buying… and safer.
Directories provide one-way inbound links to your site, and drive traffic to your site through direct referrals. By doing this, they boost your link popularity and ultimately improve your search rankings. All this done naturally, and cost free in many cases.

Paid vs. free: the differences and the similarities.
Paid directories quickly list your site, were free ones may take several weeks or even months to review it. On the other hand, some paid directories charge expensive listing fees for the link they provide, and that is not cost effective. If you work on a limited budget for your site, you may want to submit to a handful of paid directories but a few hundred of free ones. Of these last ones, prioritize “one-ways” preferably. Whatever directories you submit to, paid or free or a combination of both types, the quality of the directory itself should be the biggest consideration in your decision.

The directory page that counts is were the link is.
When doing a directory submission, not only look at the PageRank of the homepage, but also of the subpage, where your link will be. While it may seem like a benefit to have your site listed on a PR7 directory, this is less effective when you realize that the internal page where your link is actually only a PR3, when you expected more.

Pagerank is not the only factor of directory quality.
A low PR directory is not necessarily a bad one. New directories fall in this category. These directories do review and list sites quicker. Also, when they become more popular, so will your listing. Again, base your decision based on the quality of the directory. And keep in mind whether or not the directory is search engine friendly. When checking the structure of the link to your site, make sure it is not dynamic.

Directories links shouldn’t be more than 10%.
You shouldn’t have more than this percentage in your overall inbound links count. Don’t rely on directories alone as your link source. Diversify them for your benefit.
Please refer to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics – Part 2 for more sources.

Internet link directories are web directories of internet resources. They are something like a huge library that is on the internet that lists internet resourses and evaluates them. Deep link directories are directories that offer links to inner pages in addition to the home page. Deep links benefit webmasters because they give links deep within the website, not just the homepage adding valuable page rank to inner pages.

One might ask, why deep link? There are many reasons why. Webmasters might target a particular deep linked page which they would like to gain rankings for. When submitting your deep link to a deep link directory, you will give your deep linked page much more exposure this way.

You will also help the search engine rankings for that particular deeplinked page as well. Since you will have links going back only to that particular deep linked page, it will increase the strength of that page.

One of the most popular link directories is The Open Directory Project and it is maintained by experts who evaluate all submissions.Directories such as The Open Directory Project are an excellent source for anyone looking for information on the internet.

The better directories, such as The Open Directory Project, have human editors that review and evaluate all submitted material to be included in the site. Having human eyes evaluate the material is effective in eliminating over lapping material, scammers and garbage web sites.

There are basically two types of directories and they are free directories and directories that require a fee for each submission. The up side of a free directory is that is costs nothing, but you can’t be sure if your submission will ever be posted. Paid directories are a much better benefit since the paid directory owners keep a much closer eye on their directory. They are sure to drop any submissions from low quality sites that will only have negative impact on reputation from search engines.

There are an astounding number of link directories available on the internet and if you use the term link directory to search on Google, you will see that there are well over a million listed, so your choices are many. Displaying your site on a link directory lends credibility to your website and this is the main reason for doing it, also it can help to generate hits and business on your site.

It is recommended that you submit to as many free directories as possible, but your submission must have solid information and be unique, to increase its chances of acceptance. The value of link directories can not be understated and more and more people are using them for

information on the internet.