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A quick and easy way to obtain 370 links to your site would be by using directory submission.
While this in itself, is unlikely to propel your site to position 1 in search engines, it can help your site to rank for some more obscure terms - and once a site ranks for anything, it stands a massively higher chance of naturally obtaining links.
To naturally obtain links will require high quality content.
Choose effective keywords for your submission
In order to get the most benefit from directory submission, you need to know the most effective keywords that potential visitors are using when searching. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of keywords, we would direct you to our introduction to keywords tutorial.
Search engines will read the anchor text of links coming into your site. Therefore, we require incoming links which contain our keywords. If we were obtaining natural links from users - if they found our site and linked to it, every single user would be unlikely to use the same anchor text. For instance, if our website homepage sold fancy breeds of dogs, not every user would link to it using the anchor text "fancy breeds of dogs".
Make incoming links look natural
In order to make our link building process have some of the same benefits as aqquiring natural links, we recommend varying the anchor text for links you collect yourself.
Links from directories are usually to a field called "title". This title relates to the title of the website in question. When choosing titles, we need to include the company name, and also (perhaps) one or two relevant keywords.
Directories often require the company name to be the title, however many are slightly more flexible. For our purposes, and for speed of submission, we will assume that all directories allow keywords to be placed into the title.
Choose the data you will submit carefully
It is important to note that most directories will only link to the websites homepage. Therefore we need to choose a title, and keywords, that relate to our site's homepage.
We need to research phrases and keywords would use when searching for our product, and draw up a short list of effective keywords. When this is done, we need to create a list of 5 or so titles for our site - that we will use randomly throughout submission.
Our 5 titles could be:
- Fancy dog breeds by dogsrus
- Information on fancy dogs at dogsrus
- Learn about fancy dog breeds at dogsrus
- breeds of fancy dogs
- fancy dogs and breeds
Assuming each phrase before the company name is searched for, describes the sites homepage well to users, and is varied.
We are more concerned with creating attractive phrases to users then search engines when choosing text - so if the only possible combination is not human readable, discard it and simply use an alternative phrase.
Short titles are more likely to be accepted into directories, and strings of keywords will not (or will have very, very low success rate).
Directory lists
The best list bar none that we have found is currently online at vilesilencer.com.
However good a list of directories is, some will always be out of action, or using no followed links.
For our submission, we will be using fireform and nodofollow firefox add ons, and of course mozilla firefox browser.
Making it easier to submit - semi auto submission
For effective submission, it is always a good plan to have nodofollow add on running. When a directory is loaded, we can navigate through it to our chosen category - and examine the links there already in place.
In a sample category, we can see links at the same level of the directory as ours will be. In the directory we have chosen for the video, we can see that they are all followed (blue) links. Therefore, we will proceed to submit.
If the links were actually no followed, we would assume that our site would get no SEO benefit of being listed there - although of course, no followed links from very high traffic sites may still bring us visitors. We will risk the wrath of directory owners by advising that you only submit to directories that consistently use followed links.
We have used fireform add on as seen in our previous video to "learn" the form fields of many directories. In this case, the match is exact and using the add on fills in all form fields. If you have not used Fireform, we recommend watchign our video on Mozilla Firefox add ons for SEO.
This process can be repeated for all directories in this list, varying the chosen title as much as possible. For our sample set of 5 titles, and assuming we are submitting to 370 directories, you would need to change the title for every 75 directories.
Setup a throwaway email address for SPAM
Finally, we recommend setting up a throwaway email address on your sites domain - as although many directories will never use it, some will use your address for mailing purposes. We simply create an email address "links@domain.com", and change it every few months.
We hope you have much success with directory submission. If you have any directory listings, or any comments, we would like to hear about them. Happy SEO'ing!
