Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your SEO rankings. You can think of these links as votes in favor of your website (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high quality links for your site is very time consuming, however it is a very important thing to do if you want to maximize search engine rankings.
How Link Directories Can Help You
Using a link directory is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. A link directory is basically a site which has a huge collection of links that are sorted by categories. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will use links directories as an alternative to doing a search engine inquiry.
There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. Many of them FREE, but many of them not. Generally a paid link directory is the one you want to target as you are paying for service.
When you submit your site to a link directory, your submission will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of your site, and whether it is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines love links that point to your site from quality link directories.
You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are a number of reasons why you want to do this. Firstly, you will get targeted traffic to your site when people search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will increase you search engine rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will help your website pages to get indexed quicker in Google which drives the most traffic.
Some Features Of Link Directories
When you submit to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look similar to this: Featured Links, Regular Links or Regular Links With Reciprocal link. The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is always a charge for featured links and this is the main method that link directories monetize their sites. The trouble here is that if a lot of web owners are buying featured links for a particular category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list. With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with reciprocal are offered for free. If you’re just starting out you generally won’t have much budget and would need to make sure your expenditure gives you a direct return. So choose regular links and any that offer to you for FREE. There are an overwhelming number of link directories if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly overspend without much return. There are countless free directories to choose from. Finally, always choose the regular link option rather than the reciprocal link option if possible. Some directories will charge for regular one way links but there are enough web directories out there that should give you a FREE link. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable that reciprocal links (reciprocal links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).
So start submitting and all the best with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories as a part of your strategy for gaining targeted traffic to your website. It is not the be all and end all.
