General mistakes to avoid when submitting to Internet directories

Directory Submissions, Increase traffic — By SeoOn on May 24, 2009 at 12:31 am

More Back links cannot hurt a website rankings, even the poorest ones, otherwise that would be used by your competitors to bring your website down. Nevertheless, by submitting to weak directories and at the wrong pace you are merely wasting your time and often money.

In addition wasting time on getting poor backlinks will delay achieving high rankings for your targeted keywords. So the point is that you need to be very scrupulous when selecting resources that link to your site.

Without much ado, I will summarise the aspects you have to consider when submitting a site to directories:

1. Choose nothing but trustworthy directories. A collection of well-ranking High-PageRank directories is presented at the end of this article.

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

3. Submit primarily to relevant categories. Choose a relevant category for submission, ideally such that befits your topic exactly. If a directory doesn’t contain a category related to the site being submitted, it is of little worth submitting to. Links from Miscellaneous or Other category are usually of very little value.

4. Submit to deep link directories. Submit about 15-20% of the links to deep directories, which allow to link to internal pages of a site.

5. Submit gradually, but regularly! Avoid submitting a site to hundreds or thousands of directories at once. A sudden change in number of backlinks may trigger Google over optimisation filter and will lower your site ranking. Gradual and steady accumulation of the link mass is more natural and, hence, is approved of by search engines.

6. Post links with carefully targeted words in the anchor, to make sure those are very relevant to the texts of the website page you are trying to promote.

7. Vary the anchor. Avoid using the same anchor text too often. Vary the anchor texts by employing synonyms and numerous combinations of the main keywords with various adjectives.

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

8. Do not submit to dynamic link pages. Some directories do not provide a constant place for your link, but instead offer a location, which is dynamic, i. e. depends on the directory internal factors (newly added links, paid positioning, user voting etc. ). This kind of links are not worth much, so use them as the last resort in the link building project.

By following most of the above-mentioned guidelines and not committing mistakes I pointed out in the present article, you will shortly discover that directory submission can be quite a powerful tool in the overall link-building strategy.

And keep 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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