Some directories (particularly the General SEO directories) offer a premium submission. This submission will cost you more money but will come with one or more of the following benefits:
1. Quick Turn Around Time
This usually ranges from 12 hours to 3 days, although if your paying for your submission at all then it should always be reviewed within one week. Without the other benefits below this by itself is not enough of an incentive to justify the extra payment.
2. Guaranteed Inclusion
Paying premium here will guarantee your link being included in the directory. Potentially valuable if you doubt the quality of your website under the eyes of a judging human editor. The reality is most sites are built to make money and Adsense ads and affiliate programs can sometimes get in the way of acceptance. On the flip side directories (generally) are also built to make money and so there are some that will always accept your website if you pay the fee.
3. Link Flexibility
As search engine algorithims continue to develop directories are increasing their flexibility to meet the webmaster demand for keyword rich links rather than having to use their website / company name. This allows you to use your target keywords in your links which will have the knock-on effect of improving your search engine relevancy for those keywords. A valuable benefit in an internet world where the big search engines are trying to weed out “unnatural” links.
4. Additional Links to Internal Pages
Premium payment will generally allow you to have anything between 3 and 7 internal pages of your website included in your link submission. This means that you will be getting up to 8 internal links from one submission. Internal page links always allow flexibility in the anchor text and so can be useful for improving the search engine positioning of these pages.
Depending on the particular project I generally consider paying premium for 3 and 4.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Choose Right Directory for submission
Not every directory that allows the submission of your url is worth submitting to. There are certain things that you should analyze - particularly if you are giving a reciprocal link or parting with a submission fee.
When I have built a website and am submitting it to directories these are the criteria I judge a directory by:
Directory Specific
1. Its Page Rank
Ideally you want PR 4 or above. If it’s free or offers reciprocal link exchange then I may go below this threshold especially with highly related niche directories which have a lot of very targeted traffic travelling through them
2. Its Link Popularity
Good directories work hard to have lots of incoming links so as to increase their value which in turn increase their attraction to webmasters. This free tool will help you analyze the link popularity of a directory (and any other website).
Inside The Directory
3. The Page Rank of the page my particular link will appear on:
A good home page PR does not always translate into a good internal page PR. Check your category page for PR value.
4. The number of links that the directory includes on each page:
The more outbound links there are on a page the more watered down your link will be. Here less is more.
5. The extensiveness of the category breakdown:
The more targeted to your target niche the better but you don’t want to be 6 steps from the home page.
Directory Submission Guidelines
If the most common reason for having your website rejected is submitting it to the wrong category the second is that you write your link submission wrongly. A link submission will include a Title, Description and URL. To assure acceptance it should meet these criteria:
1. Correct Title
If you’re submitting your site to a directory that states you should use your website / company name in the title then use it. The temptation here is to use your target keywords for which you will pay the price of rejection.
2. Objectivity
Your description should be descriptive and objective. Write down what your website actually does as if you were saying it to the tax man rather than a customer. You would break it down into a clear description that involved no hype or promotion. Your description should reveal the purpose of your site, what it facilitates, not attempt to cause a browser to react in a certain way.
3. Home Page URL
If the directory requires that you submit a link to your home page only, don’t submit a link to a different internal page.
Moving away from meeting requirements and into tactics - from an SEO standpoint there are several things that you want to try to do to achieve in the all seeing eyes of the search engines a natural and organic linking structure. This principally revolves around using different target keywords in your link anchor text. Obviously you will not have this freedom on directories which require your website name to be the anchor text but on other directories and niche directories in particular aim to use between 5 and 10 slightly different links which use different target keywords or different amalgamations of your target keywords.
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