Smart Directory Submission Strategies

Now that I’ve started a directory of my own, I’m doing more research about using them wisely to build traffic to your sites. The direct traffic from a directory is unlikely to be very high, as many of the directories have less than stellar traffic themselves. So the main point of them is to create genuine inbound links to your site - the type of links that the search engines value in ranking your site.

From Threadwatch:

Common sense would dictate that if you’re going to submit, free or paid, to lots of directores you…

Vary anchor text
Have at least a third as deep links
* Check the quality of the directory you’re submitting to

Pretty sound advice, in a nutshell. #1 is particularly important. When I submitted this blog around town, I put “blue mushrooms” in every link title. Guess what happened? I’m getting more searchers looking for “mushrooms” than anything this site is actually about. So I recently changed it to “Affiliate Marketing and Webmaster Journal”, which is more descriptive of the blog, anyway. That should change the keywords I’m ranking for, making them more relevant, and driving better traffic (quality is just as important as quantity - you need both).

#2 is also interesting. It’s saying you should link to pages other than your index page. That’s something I haven’t tried, but very intriguing. If I linked to the SEO page, for example, and listed the blog as an SEO blog, that might drive far more targeted traffic to that particular set of pages. Hey, I should try links to all my various categories - then I might find a niche I can appeal to.

As for #3, I’m not sure that matters. I tend to go for higher PR directories first, but I don’t skip over the 0’s. They may be 0 because they’re new, but they may leap to a 5 or 6 very quickly. If you have any reason to think they’re spamming, I’d look at their WhoIs info and start hunting rather than just check their PR.