General mistakes to avert when submitting to Internet directories

Directory Submissions, Increase traffic, SEO news — By SeoOn on May 24, 2009 at 12:33 am

Additional backlinks cannot hurt your site rankings, even the weakest ones, or else that would be exploited by your competitors to bring your site down. However, when submitting to weak directories and at the wrong pace you will be merely wasting your time and often money.

In addition spending time on acquiring poor backlinks will postpone obtaining top rankings for your targeted keywords. So the point is – be very careful when choosing resources to link to your site.

Without wasting anymore time, I will summarise the aspects you have to bear in mind when submitting your website to directories:

1. Choose only high quality directories. A list of well-ranking High-PageRank directories is shown at the end of this article.

2. Give preference to high-ranking directories. If unsure of quality of a directory, choose for submission those, which rank high on the keywords they are optimized for.

3. Submit only to relevant categories. Pick an appropriate category for submission, ideally the one that matches your topic precisely. If a directory doesn’t contain a category relevant to your website, it is of little worth submitting to. Submission to Other or Miscellaneous category are usually of little value.

4. Submit to deep link directories. Submit about 15-20% of your links to deep link directories that permit to link to inner pages of your site.

5. Submit gradually, but regularly! Do not submit a website to hundreds or thousands of directories at once. A sudden change in number of backlinks may trigger Google over optimisation filter and will push your site down in SERPs. Gradual and steady increase in the link mass looks more natural and, therefore, is approved of by search engines.

6. Post links with carefully targeted terms in the anchor text, to make sure those are very relevant to the content of the site page you are promoting.

Vary the anchor. Avoid using the same anchor text too much. Employ alternate anchor texts by using synonyms and different combinations of the main keywords with various adjectives.

7. Avoid submitting to web directories with nofollow attribute and redirect. These are of little worth, unless they bring direct traffic, which is tangible only from rather popular and highly attended resources.

8. Do not submit to dynamic link pages. A number of web directories do not offer a permanent place for your link, but instead offer a position, which is dynamic, i. e. depends on the directory internal factors (paid positioning, newly added links, user voting etc. ). Such links are of little benefit, therefore use them as your last resort in your link building campaign.

By following most of the aforementioned guidelines and bypassing mistakes I highlighted in this article, you may shortly find that directories submission can be quite a powerful part of the link-building activity.

And bear in mind – poor backlinks are not worthy of the time spent! In the long run it’s quality, rather than quantity, that matters!

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