Submitting To Web Directories For Max SEO Effect

Choosing The Right Directories
When choosing directories to submit to, look for ones that have been indexed by Google and have at least a page rank of 0. If their page rank is showing no data or a gray bar, you may want to wait before submitting to that particular directory. (You can see page rank and find out if a site has been indexed by Google very quickly by downloading Google’s toolbar).

You will find that many of the free directories out there come and go quickly. Especially web directories that don’t have a page rank. The directory owners realize quickly that without page rank they wont get many submissions and they decide the cost of running a free directory is not worth it.

Your time is best spent submitting to directories that have been around for awhile and have a solid page rank. Once you have done all of those you can move on to directories that are newer.

Try to make your submissions as random as possible. If you do 100 directory submissions every day, that doesn’t appear natural to a search engine because they could see you getting 100 new links each day. Make it as random as possible so that you avoid any red flags being put up. (This suggestion is not as critical as the others because search engines wont find every link at the same time but its always better to be safe than end up on page 53 of Google’s results).

Note: Be sure to create an email address that you use only for directory submissions as you will most likely start to receive a lot of junk email from these free directories.

Submitting For Max SEO Effect
Now that you know which directories you should submit your site to, we will talk about how to most effectively submit your site to each directory.

First, Be sure to choose the most relevant category to submit your site to. Browse through the directory and find sites that are very similar to yours and submit to the same category that they have
submitted to. This will put your link and description with other similar links and descriptions thus making the link more relevant to your site.

Second, when choosing titles make sure you choose terms you want to rank in the search engines for. This is going to be the anchor text of the link that you will get in the directory. Anchor text plays a huge role in where your website will rank. So many times I see people submit titles that no one would ever search and for the most part I would say it is a waste. Choose titles that you know will bring valuable traffic if you ever ranked for the term.

Third, mix up the descriptions. It is easy to keep using the same description for every submission that you do, but easy is not always better in link building. You must always keep in mind that search
engines want to see links that appear to happen in the natural evolution of the internet. In other words they don’t want to see purchased links or links that have the same description attached to
it over and over. Chances are that if they see either of those two things, your link will be discounted.

Try to write as many unique descriptions as you can. Yes it can be tedious and boring but if you are willing to put in the hard work, chances are your competitors are not and that gives you a decisive
advantage over them.

Paid vs. Free Web Directories
People often ask whether it is better to submit to paid or free directories. Nothing beats free in life. Or is it nothing in life is free? Either way, we are tempted to look at free directory submissions versus paid submissions to see which is better.

More importantly you should know how paid submissions can be better. I think the single biggest factor that gives paid submissions an advantage over free submissions is the time in which your website will actually be added to the directory.

Because of the high number of submissions to free directories, directory owners are slower to approve new submitted sites. Some directories will take up to 6 months to add your site to their directory. Whereas with paid submissions, most directories have a 24-48 hour inclusion guarantee.

Keep in mind that if you do enough free submissions there will be many that accept and include your site right away, but every paid submission is guaranteed to include your site within a day or two. I guess it all comes down to what is important to you.

Another reason paid submissions can be have an advantage is that if you submit to a well known paid directory like business.com or yahoo.com, search engines know that those directories are expensive and that only someone serious about their web business would submit there, so they give those links a little more weight.

The draw back is that it can get expensive to submit to paid directories and you can achieve high rankings without the paid directories so I will leave that up to you.