Directories and SEO.

Directory submissions can be a great way to build high quality links for your website and help give it a boost in the search engines. So with so many directory submission sites and software all over the web offering for example, 10, 000 + directory submissions for $10 you would be mad to miss out? However this is not always the case.

Bad Neighborhoods

Many directories offer extremely poor links, either hidden away behind database queries unreachable by search engines, or by being associated with frowned upon websites either by sharing a server or through advertising. Either way, to have your site submitted to a large number of directories, with yourself having little to no involvement could either be damaging or just pointless if the links are hidden.

Variation is the key to life… and SEO

Submitting sites to well known and established directories is a well-respected search engine optimisation technique. However, if that’s your only technique and source of backwards links you will not achieve the result you are hoping for as quickly as if you were to diverge your links through forums, exchanges with related sites, blogging and offer SEO techniques

So what directories should I submit my site to?

First of all DMOZ,

www.dmoz.org

This is arguably the best directory site on the web, it is free and human edited. However, getting accepted seems almost close to impossible and has suffered of late from a lot of corrupted or lazy editors.

Second recommended directory is Yahoo’s own,

http://dir.yahoo.com

This is a free directory for non-commercial sites, $299 (around £168) for commercial websites.

How beneficial are paid directories?

Earlier this week Google also removed from its Webmaster Guidelines

Maybe hinting directories are not as important and no longer ranked as highly by Google’s algorithm as once considered. This being said at SJL we would not recommend paying to have your site included in a directory. However, we still recommend using free directories as they can still produce good backlinks to your website. So we have compiled a list of free directory sites we have used multiple times and have produced good results.

Highly recommended free directories.

• http://www.littlewebdirectory.com/links.asp

• http://www.sjldirectory.co.uk

• http://www.mygreencorner.com

• http://www.wikidweb.com

• http://www.webworldindex.com

• http://www.worldwidewub.org/

• http://www.netinsert.com/

• http://mastermoz.com/

• http://www.search4i.com/

Tags: directories, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.