Link Building - Directories
Search Engines see links to your web site as a vote to your web site and Directories are the easiest way to get them! (note: but not the only way)
As part of Link Building one of the most valuable ways is through Directories. In terms of Search Engine Optimization most people haven’t seen the full potential of Directories. Some people put Directories in the same category as Link Farms (which are bad, I will talk about this more later). A directory is a list of web sites organized into categories. Unlike search engines these web sites are manually entered into a directory and put in a category etc, Directories do not spider/crawl web sites.
Directories are very useful for two main reasons:
- Your web site can be found by people and generate traffic to your web site.
- Directories have a link to your web site meaning that you will be building your way up to a better Search Engine position.
The Directory that will benefit you the most will be the Open Directory Project – http://www.dmoz.com. The Open Directory project is a High PageRank web site and not only is it displayed on http://www.dmoz.com but http://directory.google.com and numerous other places, with all the links and topic targeted visitors this Directory can be seen as the most important and as an essential part of generating links and topic targeted visitors.
The easily identifiable mark to see if a directory is part of the Open Directory Project is to see if the following image is displayed on their web site.
If you have already submitted your web site to any one of the web sites that is part of the Open Directory Project you do not and should not submit your web site to the directory again.
Having said so much about the Open Directory Project, it is not the only directory you that you want your web site to be in, there are more directories you should submit your web site to for two reasons:
Generating Links – Directories are a great way to generate links. I would suggest finding a good directory list like http://addurl.nu and submitting your web site to many directories (depending on how much time you have) starting off with the higher PageRank directories and working your way down.
Targeted Visitors – If directories are topic specific, as said in the previous article about Search Engines, topic specific Directories will help your web site because you can also get targeted traffic to your web site. For example, if you had a recipe web site and you had it in a cooking directory and someone was looking for a recipe they might go to a cooking directory and find your web site.
Now that I've said why directories are so useful I have to publicize my own web site directories which are titled The Great Directory and The Net Directory.
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