When rolling out a new site there is a need to create inbound links quickly (and more often than not, cheaply). There are several ways to do this, one of the oldest methods used by SEO’s is the traditional directory submission.
There are many directories and web portals out there that accept submissions and will (providing your site is of a reasonable standard) provide you with a link from a relevant category. Indeed, many websites entire content is made up of links and descriptions, so it is in their interest to approve you.
SEO’s will want to first ensure that the directories they are submitting to offer plain html text links ie no javascript (which search engines struggle to parse), and also that the link is bareback (without a link condom… the nofollow tag, originally intended to combat blogspam, but now just providing headaches to all concerned). Some directory owners go so far as to cloak their pages so that the search engines receive a different page than the casual browser to avoid ‘PR leakage’ ~ wandering off topic slightly, this is a method often employed by blackhats when performing link exchanges, so you end up linking to them and the search engines never see them linking back. Very sneaky.
Secondly, reciprocal linking directories should be avoided. That just reeks of late nineties SEO, and all the link exchange pages you end up with won’t help anyone. One way links are the way to go, so if there is a paid option, pay the price.
The real debate here is whether you should submit to all the directories that you can find that meet our criteria, or just a few quality, possibly paid, directories. I’ve heard marketing guru Shoemoney recommend submitting to everything and anything going, the theory I guess being throw enough shoot and some will stick (the value of a link from many lower ranking directories seems negligible), but to me this seems a little too much like the old FFA pages (they’re still around!). I might do this for a MFA site, or small affiliate site, but for a ‘proper’ website I would be inclined to go for DMOZ, Yahoo and several good quality paid directories. Gathering low quality, essentially spammy, links too quickly seems negative to me.
Before submitting to directories, consider the anchor text you want for the links (title), and the keywords that you need in the description. Don’t submit the same title and description to each directory.
Don’t forget to give your link monkey Friday afternoon off as a reward if you do get him to submit to all those directories, it can’t be fun.
January 19th, 2007 at 9:32 am
[...] For the last couple of years article marketing has formed part of my launch campaign for any new simple affiliate/adsense sites. For many of the sites (especially ones designed for niche markets) article marketing and directory submission would be the only inbound link generation work I would do – if it is enough to get you to the top, why do any more? [...]
January 20th, 2007 at 7:05 am
[...] Relevant deep links are of increasing SEO value as more traditional methods of producing links (see directories and article marketing) are being devalued. If someone like text-link-ads.com were to produce a similar plugin to integrate with their link sales system it would be a great improvement on the blogroll style links they are selling now. [...]