Is Submitting Your Website to Directories Still Worthwhile?

For a long time, one of the first suggestions of many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists for improving your rankings on the major search engines was to submit your website to web directories, preferably human edited ones.

I assume everyone or mostly everyone reading this article knows the difference between a directory and a search engine. Business.com is a directory because it contains categories of sites organized by subject as opposed to producing pure search results based on the user’s keyword selection.

A recent survey on Internet marketing reveals that getting back links on Web Directory sites are getting more popular than ever. Internet based marketing is the easiest way to create awareness about your products or services on market and get benefit from it. In order to get link juice for a site one just needs to do some web directory submissions and create a few inbound links from possible sources on the internet. Internet link buildings are very necessary to generate good SEO ranking for a site that helps to increases visitor traffic. And it brings opportunities for webmasters to convert a large amount of web traffics into Dollar($) counts.

Web directory submission is a step forward to create incoming links to your site. Generally, it comes under one-way link building, where the details information of our site is linked from the appropriate category of a web directory. It’s also known as regular link building. But some directory sites demands to exchange their links with us in order to make the approval process quicker or to make our website link more permanent. That’s the choice of a webmaster to decide.

The process is commonly known as reciprocal link building. Regular or Reciprocal nothing makes any sense unless it generates hand some traffic to your site. There are plenty of web directory sites available on the Internet with just a click away from you. While doing web directory advertising, the following points should be considered, in order to increase the chances of being listed.

1. ODP editors prefer website names rather than any commercial keyword.

2. Short and specific description about the website is highly appreciated.

Being listed on online directories will give your business added visibility, help you build inbound links to your web site, and help you get improved search engine rankings as well. So the added benefits of web directory submission are two fold: you increase your search engine rankings and generate online visitor traffic to your website at the same time. Nowadays, website owners and webmasters worldwide partially rely on online directory submissions to build incoming links and rank high on natural search results. Some of these are hard to get into, while some others are relatively easy.

The effectiveness of your directory listings is heavily dependent on how effectively you use the ‘anchor text’. The anchor text is simply the title of the link back to your site. This is very important because it tells the search engines how other sites see you and describe you, which in turn guides them in indexing you. So if you have an incoming link from a top authority site such as DMOZ (now:resource-zone.com) that happens to have your main keywords in the title or the anchor text, you are substantially increasing your chances for being ranked high for those particular keywords.

Why do the engines consider sites like these edited web directories to be authority sites? Well partially because they know if a site is listed on a site such as DMOZ then it will have passed the inspection of a human editor. For the search engine spider, which has no eyeballs of its own, this is an important indication of quality and relevance. And what keeps the search engines in business is giving its viewers quality, relevant results. The other factor that will be a key determinant in whether or not your directory submissions are successful or not is how well you choose the category. If the category is related to your site then it will be considered a relevant link but if it is not, then it may be little better than having your link in a “link farm” as it will appear random to the search engine spiders.

So if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your directory submissions choose your anchor text wisely and only submit to the category that matches the content of your website and you should be fine.