Building Backlinks With Directory Submissions

The Importance of Building Backlinks With Directory Submissions

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts all agree that in order to have your website appear high up in search engine results pages (SERPs) you need as many high-quality back-links pointing to your site as possible.

There are many ways in which you can drive traffic to a website, for instance buying page impressions from traffic exchange sites, buying a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign, posting free or paid classified adverts, or making sure that your pages appear high up in SERPs. Generally speaking, the best quality, most profitable traffic your website can receive comes from ordinary, every day searches. This traffic is called organic traffic.

So why is organic traffic so important, and indeed profitable (assuming your site to be commercial in nature)? The people who arrive on your site after searching for a keyword or keyword phrase are obviously already interested in the topic your page is about. If you’re selling a product or service related to that search, organic traffic is worth its weight in gold, as these people are effectively free leads I.E if they go on to buy your product or service, that sale is all but one hundred percent profit (minus your running costs, naturally).

Of course, you could consider investing in a PPC campaign to guarantee your site appears at the top of Google’s pages for a specific keyword or keyword phrase, but many smaller websites just can’t afford to compete with larger companies, who can outbid them, especially in more competitive niches. For sure you’ll make sales from PPC, but what will your profit margins be like then? Ten percent? Five percent? In actual fact, many smaller or inexperienced webmasters who do not have the benefit of a large advertising budget (even a dedicated advertising team, as in the case of large corporations) can often finish up making a loss on their investment. For this reason as well as for reasons of general economy - most webmasters who are working for themselves or for small businesses focus on driving organic traffic to their websites as the most cost effective solution to building their online presence. In other words, they look to SEO.

The basic principals of SEO revolve around making your pages appear attractive to search engines, I.E. to have metatags, titles, subtitles and headings containing the keywords you are targeting, and to make sure that your content is both original and uses your keyword phrases as often as possible whilst still being easily readable and informative for the human visitors you are obviously trying to attract.

In order to get your pages up to the very top positions in SERPs you need lots of links pointing to your sites. This is because search engines ‘think’ that pages with lots of links pointing to them must be more ‘important’ (or relevant) than pages with fewer links pointing to them. Although in practice it’s a little more subtle and complex than this, as a general rule, the more links that point to your site, the higher up in the SERPs your site will appear, and the more links that contain your chosen keywords as the anchor text, the higher you will appear for those keywords when a user searches for them. This is why it is so important - especially for new sites - to research your keywords carefully and target a phrase that has both a decent number of searches performed using it, and for which the competition is relatively low. Then, as your site becomes more established over time, you can begin to target more competitive keyword phrases. Remember, if your site does not appear in the top two or three pages for your targeted keywords, very few users (if any) will find you, and you may as well not exist.

This is where directories come in, and why they are both so popular and useful. Online directories are big business. There are literally thousands of them, most general, some targeting specific niches. The best database of (just free) directories has over thirteen hundred of them on their list, and more than six hundred of these have a Google page rank of three or above. Most directories offer a free submission service, with the option of paying a premium for a better listing, a quicker review time or to receive additional ‘deep links’. Some charge a one-off fee for inclusion and offer a lifetime listing, others require that you place a reciprocal link back to them somewhere on your site. They all allow you to post a short description and (nearly all) to choose the anchor text for your link. The anchor text should of course always be the specific keyword phrase you are targeting. The traffic your site will receive from directories is negligible, the point is to get links. Lots of links.

Unfortunately, submitting your site’s information to directories is both immensely tedious and time-consuming. Even if you pay for some kind of semi-automation software that auto-fills the fields for you, submitting your sites to directories is an incredibly boring process that most webmasters prefer to avoid. For this reason, many SEO companies offer manual directory submission services as part of their consultation packages, or as a stand-alone offer. The prices they charge vary quite considerably, as do the quality of the directories they submit to. Most charge between twelve cents and twenty five cents per directory, and most also charge a little less for bulk submissions. The time and effort that using their services saves is often well worth the relatively small fee.