Back links are a vital part of raising your score with the
search engines. Buying links can be very expensive and finding sites willing to
link to your site can be very time consuming. Still link building should play
an important part of your web site promotion strategy.
Submitting your web site to relevant free inclusion web directories is an easy
way to gain back links to your web site. There are hundreds of inclusion web
directories on the Internet willing to link to you web site for free.
The purpose of this list of web directories is to make it easier to add your web
site to a large number of online directories. Choose the Google Page Rank (PR)
below that you would like to start with, the list can be filtered to remove
specialty web directories by checking the “View General Directories only”
checkbox. Click on the link directory you would like to add your web site to.
Click on the add site or the link suggest/add
url and follow the instructions of the directory. Often you will
be asked to work your way to the most relevant category before you suggest your
link for inclusion. When you are finished adding your web site, close the
window and choose the next directory.
Automated Directory Submission
While you may want to manually submit your website to the major directories, submitting to hundreds or thousands of directories will take a huge amount of time. This is where directory submission software can be a real time saver. The better software like
Deep Linker allows you the control of submitting your site yourself while still doing most of the work for you.
When choosing directory submission software there are several things you should make sure that it offers.
- Free Updates – New directories are added every day. You don’t want to have to pay to upgrade the software just to get the next set of directories
- Multiple Titles allowed – It’s usually best to use several different link text combinations when submitting links
- Captcha help – many directories use a captcha to limit automatic submissions, a good software help you get to that point, entering in all the data for you so all you have to do is enter the captcha
- Allow for multiple websites – Likely you have more than one website, if not, you might in the future. Be sure the software allows you to do the work for multiple sites.
Directory Submission Services
An option for those that don’t have the time to add their websites to hundreds
of directories is to use a directory submission service. The
price varies considerable for these services depending on the features offered.
Some of the things that can affect the price are:
-
Do they check to see if your website is already in the directory before
submitting? If not then the service may only be suitable for new websites that
have not been submitted before.
-
Do they vary the link text? It’s best not to have the text used for the links
all the same. If the directory allows, try to switch between several choices of
text.
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How many web directories do they submit to?
-
Will they give you a list of all the web directories they submit to?
-
Over what period of time do they submit to directories? Some will submit to
several hundred directories, it might be best to stagger this over a few
months.
-
What is the mixture of PRs for the directories? You would not want to pay a lot
to be submitted to only PR0 directories, while it’s fine to submit to them too,
you would want to be sure there are many PR5, PR6
and PR7 directories submitted to also.
Don’t expect 100% acceptance in free submit web directories. If the service does
a good job most of the web directories should accept your site, but often not
all will.
Other Promotional Strategies
While web directory submission should not be the only link building strategy you
use, it can be very effective in adding back links to your site. Don’t forget
to check out our “Article
submission”, “Press
release”, and "SEO
Forum" pages for more tips on link building.
If you need more information on how to submit your web site to a link directory
you will find this article to be useful.