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One Way Linking Strategies Using Link Directories
By John Baril (c) 2008

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:

o Featured Links
o Regular Links
o 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.
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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: http://www.wealth-dynamo.com
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