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14 MayHow To Submit To Directories

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If you’re in a fairly low or average competition industry as far as keywords are concerned, then submitting to directories can be a great way to build links and produce pretty good results in a short amount of time. Throw in social media and article creation into your link building mix and you’re likely to produce some pretty astonishing results far beyond your like for like competition.

Before you start submitting your site to directories there’s a few things to take note of.

Free, reciprocal or paid directories?

Typically you will have a choice of three types of directory submission, paid, reciprocal and paid. Of these the paid option is probably the best if you’re budget allows for it. Paid submissions get reviewed in a shorter period of time, anywhere from 0-14 days which means you are likely to get listed quicker. The problem with free links is that they can take 1-3 months before your submission is even reviewed and most free directories tend to disappear or they simply delete your link after a year or two. Reciprocal links should be avoided as a general rule as they carry very little value in Google’s eyes, you should focus on way links at this stage.

General or Niche directories?

The best advice here is to use a good mix of both niche and general directories. With the latter, be sure to pick established directories that have been around for say two years or more.

For niche directories, and you will find that there are plenty of them out there for all kinds of industries, use a popular search engine like Google to find them. You should aim to submit to directories in the first couple of pages results as a minimum.

Also bear I mind that search engines are now looking to give a higher weighting to links from related websites, therefore niche listings are likely to be more valuable in the long run, although by it’s very nature niche directories are likely to be outnumbered by general directories in terms of link opportunities.

High or Low Page Rank?

Don’t worry about page rank at this stage, if a directory is ranking well in the search engines you should submit to it regardless of what it’s PageRank is. You will often find directories with low PageRank listing above those with high PageRank. PageRank is not  reliable guide or true reflection of the value of a directory in terms of link quality.

 

Include Keywords in Your Anchor text

If you can get away with it i.e. the directory allows you to, then you should include your target keyword search phrases in the links to your site. However this is not always possible and top directories like DMOZ will ban you for this, these kinds of directories only allow you to use your official company name in the title text. However there are also directories that do allow it, or where you can get around it by including the search phrase at the end of your company name. For example, Bob’s Builders Ltd – building contractors Kent.

Read the guidelines for the directory very carefully to see what is and what IS NOT allowed. If you’re still unsure simply look at several listings that have made into the directory and look at their title text, body text and url / link text.

Always try to get one of your search phrases in and vary the anchor text as much as possible – this will appear more natural to the search engines.

Write unique descriptions

You will typically be given 250 to 800 characters to write your description, unless specified do not simply copy and paste meta tag descriptions into here. You should also bear in mind that if you have the same description on every single page of every directory you submit to it could be seen as duplicate content which could devalue many of your links.

You should ensure your description is unique and substantial for each and every directory and that it reads well, write for people not robots.

 

Spread Your Submissions

Work out a campaign budget and period and spread your submissions equally over that period, this will look more natural and less like spam. This will be much more effective in the long run with regards to the success of your link building campaign.

Also, there is no set number of directory submissions that you need to aim for so do as much as you can over the course of your campaign and remember to spread the effort equally each week or month or year.

The Top directories

Finally, to get you started, I’ve included a list and links to the some of the best general and niche directories, both free and paid. The list is ordered in order of PageRank with PageRank 9 t the op and the last entry being a PageRank 5.

What are your thoughts on this subject or article, please feel free to share your thoughts or experiences with us by commenting on this post below.

 

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