Introduction:
Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that
you can do to improve your search engine rankings. You can think of these links as votes
in favor of your website (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high
quality links for your site can be very time consuming; however, it is a very important
thing to do if you want to get great search engine rankings.
Before I continue, let me quickly define Link Popularity (link pop) for you. Link
Popularity simply refers to the amount and quality of inbound links to your site. There
are many free tools available on the internet for checking your link popularity.
How Link Directories Can Help You
Using link directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. Just
so you know, a link directory is a web site that has a large collection of links which
are organized by topic. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will
use link directories as an alternative to doing a search engine query.
There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. I
recently typed the keywords 'link directories' in to Google and received 1,120,000 hits.
When you submit your site to a link directory, it is edited by a human. Your submission
will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of your site and whether it
is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users
of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines
love links that point to your website from quality link directories.
You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are
three reasons for doing this. First, you will get targeted traffic to your site when people
search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will increase your search engine
rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will
help your web site pages to get indexed quickly.
Some Features Of Link Directories
When you submit to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look something like this:
- Featured Links
- Regular Links
- Regular Links With Reciprocal
The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is
always a charge for featured links (this is one of the ways that link exchanges make their
money). The trouble here is that if a lot of people are buying featured links for a particular
category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list.
With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with reciprocal
are offered for free. When I submit to directories, I always choose regular links and I
only choose free ones. Listen, there is such an overwhelming number of link directories
out there, that if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly empty your bank
account. There are plenty of free ones to choose from (just type free link directories into
Google, and you will be amazed at the numbers).
A final note here is always choose the regular link (one way) as opposed to the reciprocal
option. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable than reciprocal
links (reciprocal links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).
Link directories are ranked by Google just like any other web site. The range in page rank
will be between 0 and 8. You will want to spread your submissions between all of the page
rank values. This will make your links look more natural in the eyes of the search engines.
The Submission Process
There are basically three ways that you can carry out the submission process.
1. Sign in to your favorite search engine and type in "free link directories". You
will get enough hits here to keep you busy with submitting for the rest of your days.
2. Purchase one of the many link directory submission software packages out there.
These packages are normally semi-automated and will save you a huge amount of time.
3. You can pay someone to do the submitting for you. There are plenty of web sites
that will offer to do your submissions for a fee, but be careful, as some of them are quite
spammy. Make sure to do your due diligence first. You should aim to do about 200 to 300
submissions per month.
Good luck with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories
as a key strategy for gaining targeted traffic to your website.
About The Author
I live in Delta, British Columbia, Canada with my wife and 2 young boys. I am a full time Paramedic
and I love my career. In my spare time, I may be found flying, hiking, renovating our house or
playing sports with the boys. Check out my affiliate marketing website:
www.wealth-dynamo.com
