Directories - A Way of Link Building - Read More

A webmaster always dreams that his site should rank high on Search Engines so that he can get as many natural visitors through search engines as possible. Also wants his site to get high Google Page Rank which shows the reputation of a site according to Google.

But it’s not an easy task. You have to do a lot of work – so called Search Engine Optimization – to get better Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics include Off-page and On-Page optimization.

On-Page Optimization includes some of the ways like:

1. Creating Meta - Tags

2. Writing Unique Content

3. Keyword optimization

4. Image Alt Tags

5. Using header tags (H1, H2), bold and italic keywords.

Off-Page Optimization means building incoming links (with relevant anchor texts) for your website. This is also a way to increase a site’s Google Page Rank (PR). Also, Off-Page SEO has got more importance than On-page SEO.

Link building can be of different types:

1 - Oneway links – Your link is placed on someone else’s site.

2 - Reciprocal/Two way link exchange – Both site owners agree to place each others link

3 - Three way link exchange – E.g. site A links to site B , site B to site C and site C to site A.. So indirectly it’s a way to fool search engines.

But out of all the above ways, building One-way links pointing to your site is the best part of SEO. Reciprocal links are not considered SEO friendly.

Now - What are the ways of Building One way links?

You can either get natural backlinks or have to buy them. If your site provides useful, unique and interesting content to the vistors, or if the site is offering some tools, free/paid stuffs etc., then webmaster may give reference to your site on their blog, forum or site. But that may be a hard part for some lazy webmasters.

The other way is buying links from other sites. You can either get monthly / yearly links or permanent link placements.

Various sources of buying links:

1. Directory submissions – you can submit your link on a web directory for a small review fee.

2. From various Text-link selling sites like Text-Link-Ads, TextLinkBrokers and so on – But they are a costly option.

3. You can get permanent contextual links by buying blog post reviews from PayPerPost , ReviewMe , Contextual@v7n, SponsoredReviews etc.

Directory Submission – I would like to give emphasis on directory submission as a way of link building.

The advantages of directory submission are :

* Cheap price – Most of the directories offer permanent or yearly link placement at a price ranging from $0 (free directories) to $75 .

* Submitting a listing with Anchor text, Meta Tags, Meta Keywords and Description. Also, many of the directories offer SEO friendly url’s to a listings detail page – All these add up to give the maximum SEO benefit.

There are lots of directories coming up day after day. But not all are worth submitting. You have to do some research to find the best directory.

Points to consider before getting directory links :

* What’s the Page Rank of the category where your link will get listed ?

* What’s the Page Strength of a directory ?

* Is the directory SEO friendly or not ? What’s the url structure? Also check that your links are not in the “nofollow” tags – Nofollow links are not crawled by Search engines and so no SEO value.

* Number of links on a particular page – Should not be greater than 20.

* Domain Age – Check that the directory is not built on a recently expired domain name.

Now there are two types of directories – Free and Paid.

Other than Dmoz , its hard to find a quality free directory. Most of the free directories (which keep on popping every day) are not strong enough, don’t have high category PR, contain spammy links, not well-categorized, not promoted and not well-managed (due to 100s of submissions per day). You may have to wait for years to get your site approved on Dmoz unless it’s a high quality site.

So it’s always better to spend some bucks by submitting to premium/paid strong directories. If you meet submission guidelines of the directory, in most instances, your site will get approved within 48 hours.

Some of the strong, high PR and quality directories worth submitting are : Aviva Directory Alive Web Directory NP Links Directory Business Directory

So start your link building campaign now and achieve high Rankings.