A frequent question about submitting to web directories is how often should you add your site to a new directory. You may have heard of “Black Hat” search engine optimization tactics. These are link building techniques people use to try to gain a higher rank, that the search engines, in particular Google, will penalize the site for.

One of these “Black Hat” tactics is by adding your site into a link ring that will generate hundreds or thousands of back links to your website in a very short period of time. When adding your site to web directories you need to be careful you do not imitate one of these link generators by adding too many back links at the same time.

Resist the urge to do a marathon run and add your site to every web directory on the list at one time. With a little patience you will be able to add hundreds of back links to your site in a couple months, and not upset the search engines.

Search engines like Google want to see organic back links, these are links that happen naturally by people linking to sites that they believe have useful information in them. Organic back links rarely come in hundreds at a time, it is expected that they will be added a few at a time. When adding your website to the link directories you need to follow the same pattern of only adding a few a day, this will keep the search engines from believing you have joined a link generator.

Another important consideration is that organic links do not all have the same link text. When adding your website to the web directories you will be asked for the title of your website and a description of your site. The title will often be used as the link text for your website. Be careful to follow the guidelines of the web directory in choosing your title but try not to have the same title for each directory.

By following these recommendations you should see an increase in your page rank, search engine rank for your keywords, and most importantly and increase of clients coming to your site.

...editor