SEO Tips by Steve

Submitting your website to web directories is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Link popularity is the term used to reflect how many incoming links you have to your website. Reciprocal links were a popular method of building back links for a long time, but there has been studies recently that have shown that search engines are not weighing reciprocal links as much as they used to. One-way links have become the new standard for calculating link popularity. Or in other words, getting other websites to willingly link to yours and not linking back to them from your site. This can happen naturally by people reading your content and posting their ideas or reviews of it on their website, but this alone would take a long time. One of the ways you can take initiative to build back links to your website is to submit your site to web directories. Examples of web directories would be www.dmoz.org, directory.yahoo.com, www.joeant.com, www.bestoftheweb.com, etc. Most directories will physically review your site before adding it to their list of accepted websites. Some directories are free, some will accept a reciprocal link as payment, and some require you to pay a fee to be considered for inclusion. Only think about submitting your website to directories if your site is functional, well-designed, and not spammy or misleading in any way.

DMOZ.org and the Yahoo! Directory are the most heavily weighed directories in the eyes of the spiders. The DMOZ directory (or Google Directory) is free but it takes forever to get your site reviewed. It is still smart to submit your site anway, just be extra sure your site is at its best. The Yahoo! Directory is $299, which guarantees that your site will be reviewed within 7 days. This does not mean that your site will definitely be accepted, but as long as nothing is seriously wrong with your website you should get in. This $299 fee is recurring every year that you wish to be listed. Ok so honestly, you probably won’t receive a ton of traffic from being listed in these directories. The major benefit of being listed in human edited web directories is the inbound link juice. Spiders love directories because it tells them that an actual human reviewed each of the sites to check for quality and relevancy. Search engines don’t like to leave it up to the webmaster to tell them what a website is about because there is too much room for corruption. Too many people have used spammy or unethical techniques when building websites to try to manipulate search results. So basically, you want your site in as many directories as possible, and you should be willing to pay for the good ones. If the $299 vig for the Yahoo directory is too steep for you right now you should start your link building campaign by submitting your website to the Best of the Web directory. This is the internet’s oldest directory; around since 1994. Being listed in this directory can significantly boost your site’s link popularity, and in turn improve your rankings. Botw.org now charges $99.95 per year to be listed. Submitting your site to web directories is highly recommended as a first-step for website owners, or as a fantastic addition to an already existing link building campaign by experienced marketers.

Submitting your website to web directories yourself is a tedious and time consuming task. Services like Directory Maximizer are a perfect solution. Fill in some quick information about your site, craft a few optimized titles and descriptions, and pay a small fee to have Directory Maximizer manually submit your website to a choice of ~1200 web directories. It is advised to submit to about 100 directories at a time at the rate of 100 submissions every two weeks. Gaining hundreds of links in a short period of time will raise a red flag with the search engines and they will penalize your site for it. The current rate is $0.14 cents per submission, or $14 for 100. When submitting to a 100 directories it is normal to be accepted by 10% to 50% of them. Don’t be alarmed, it is still worth the money. It is important to take advantage of the fact that you can customize your anchor text for these directory links. All of these links will point to your homepage so be sure to enter titles that contain keywords you wish to target.