You will I am sure already be aware that a directory is just a list of categories and subcategories where a multitude of websites can list themselves. So when a potential customer comes to the directory they can type in the information for what it is that they are looking for and like magic they have a complete list of websites related to the query they searched. Depending on the words the customer uses the list may be exhaustive and still require the customer to search much further for what they require. However if the wording of their search and the wording of the directory submission information is in sync then the list will be a simple display of relevant websites which the customer can then choose from. The aim then for your business is to have yourself listed in the directory appearing as high as you can in the page but also with the relevant information so that your customers when searching for your product or services find you easily.

Not only will you gain flow to your site of potential customers but listing in directories helps to build the inbound links to your website. Search engines love one way links and rate them higher than a reciprocal link so using directory submissions will perhaps not only increase your business but also increase the search engine ranking of your website therefore flowing on to further increase your business popularity. So now we need to know how we can take advantage of listings on directories and the best way to go about this for optimal customer traffic and improving our search engine ranking.

There are two types of directories basically, specific/niche directories and general directories. Specific directories are directories that relate directly to the product or service that you are selling. They pretty much guarantee traffic specific to your business and help greatly with your inbound links as other people find your information or products worthwhile. You yourself can find specific directories with your own simple internet searches. Then we have general directories which are also good options as they usually have been active for much longer than many of the niche directories. Normally the search engines give higher rewards for inbound links from older directories with more long established websites listed. So the aim is to make sure that you are listing on some of these general directories that have been in circulation for a reasonable length of time then you get impact from them as well, so you are covered in both the general and specific directory options.

Then you need to decide if you wish to use free or paid directories. Of course there are a wide variety of free directories however just because it is free does not make it the best option. Some of the paid directories will also give your site a faster response and will probably keep their listing on the paid directories for a much longer period. However, in saying that, just because you pay for them does not mean that they should be your only concern and they are not necessarily the easy way out as you still want to have maximum exposure. The free directories are also very useful in your marketing of your business and should not be ignored, you perhaps take a little longer to be posted on the directory but it is free so what is a little time to gain that extra business focus directly to your product or service. Therefore the recommendation is to submit to both free and paid directories for maximum exposure.

As stated above, especially with the free directories, give the process time. The result will not normally be an overnight event. Search engines themselves take time to give up their rewards and they reward natural link building with high search engine rankings. Adding your URL to 50 or even 100 directories in a day does not actually improve your business or your ranking. You need to pace the placement of your submissions so that the process has time to build naturally. You in fact can even be penalized by the search engines if it is obvious that you have tried to divert from the natural link building process. Submitting to directories, paid, unpaid, specific or general a few times a month will enable your link building appears more natural therefore improving slowly but surely your business traffic and the ranking you receive.

The submission process is not always a simple task involving a lot of time. One of the best ways to avoid this loss in valuable time is also to use a directory submission service as they already know a lot of the things you need to find out before you can complete your submissions yourself. The various directories have many guidelines and differing requirements along with the fact that someone is sitting somewhere reviewing your submission and deciding whether you will be approved or not. In some cases if your submission is perhaps not correctly completed or you have made an error somewhere, you can not only be rejected from using your submission but also may be rejected permanently from lodging directory submissions with that site in future. So you decide you have the time the energy and the patience to complete the task yourself and do the required research then go for it. However if you feel the task or the requirements of the task are just too much from your busy daily work schedule then consider the services of a Directory Submission Service. Either way, take action and watch the results and potentially the money roll in!

However tedious manual directory submission takes, it is necessary if you want your website to get a higher ranking for your site. The directory links you achieve from the submissions will increase the web site rankings. Submitting your website to directories is a good link building move and not one to be skipped just because of the hard work involved. A directory submission service has a list of all the best SEO friendly directories to submit to. Ordering from an expert seo company they will submit your site to a list of directories they have carefully verified, to ensure you that each directory will definitely give you a seo-friendly link. Additionally the team of submitters are trained and routine and so they perform the submissions rapidly and proficiently

Just do not fool yourself; if you order 500 directory submissions, you will not get 500 links out of it. While this is in fact a crucial element in the concept of directory submissions. The quantity of links will primarily depend on the quality of the site. So high quality sites will get out of the same amount of submissions a lot more links, especially from the top-directories than a low quality site would get. This is the reason why search engines give such a good value to directory links. It is, for the search engines, a fine reason to give a first value tag to your site. The more links you get you receive from directories the higher the quality of your site should be as directory owners only approve good sites.

Do not expect from a submission company that they will instantly submit your site after the order. The directories have many strict rules, so in all probability the directory submission service will have to edit the data supplied to increase your approval ratio. And ask yourself, would you put your trust in a doctor who do not have any other patients in the waiting room? It takes a few days before the directory submission service can start with the actual submissions. As pointed out previously, there is more to it than just passing on the work itself. A professional directory submission service also knows the directories from familiarity and so will submit the information in the exact manner it is required. Sure, the most important part is the quality of the site to get approved, but if the site is submitted to the wrong category, most directory owners will remove your submissions without even looking at the site. So a directory submission service can and has to pay attention to all of these details to ensure that the submissions are done correctly.

Directory submissions is just 1 of the recognised link building strategies and so most submissions services also offer other tactics. For example: Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public web site and tagging them with keywords. They can improve your link popularity by producing lasting one-way back links and are guaranteed to send direct traffic to your website.

When it comes to link building each tactic has it rewards and drawbacks which is why it is important to use all of them and find a seo-service that offers small monthly packages. Hiring a professional directory submission service to execute your orders, they will produce results for you at a speed you can never compete with on your own.

Blogs that Follow

…The earliest initiator of the campaign is traced to Randa Clay who on her blog posted the now popular “U Comment, I Follow” design free for all to copy and place on their own blogs as long as the blog advocates Do Follow as well…

Do Follow Blogs – How to Find Them?
…Finding a blog to comment upon is a challenge and finding a blog with dofollow enabled is even more challenging. But we all know that the benefits of the dofollow right? So, it’s time worth spends simply because comments that you left at dofollow blogs count towards your blog PR…

The Ultimate Do-Follow Link Building Guide
…This post will help explain how to locate these DoFollow blogs and how to contribute a meaningful and successful comment. Doing this properly can land you high quality backlinks, while contributing to quality of the conversations across the web…

Jason Morrison on Blog Spamming

…Spam, it’s not just for breakfast and email anymore.  Webspam is a huge problem – if you run a blog or a forum, you’re probably familiar with the gobs and gobs of gibberish being posted all over the web by spammers…

And here is a list of Do Follow Blogs

The more custom work of link building is actually quite fun. It does not really consist of link exchange anymore. You do not need to go around all the sites in your niche to beg for a link exchange and trying to be the one that got the ‘better deal’. Link building is now all about joining communities and conversations.

Here are the top 10 fun link building tips.

1. Check out the backlinks of your competition. Use Yahoo to search for their domain name and a link:competitordomain.com to see all sites that are linking to the competition. Is there any chance that you can get links from these same places? Or do even better?
2. Find blogs in your niche where you can leave your links trough comments.
3. If you’re in the business of selling things online, try sending some free stuff to bloggers for them to review. Require a link.
4. Join forums in your niche and add a link in your signature. Post genuine answers to questions and ask real questions. It is not only about getting backlinks, but also your reputation as expert on the subject.
5. If you like a product or service, write a testimonial with a link to your site in it and email it to the seller of the product or service.
6. Upload the pictures you use in your site to Flickr and add deeplinks to the description area.
7. Be the very first to notice something going on. This works especially great for smaller niches or local sites. Publish news in a niche industry and make comments about it on blogs, forums etc. That might make other people making comments about it after you link to your site.
8. Be a guest poster. Write for blogs and magazines. Rather then starting your own blog, building it up, etc. many blogs that are already quite well established, will accept guest posts.
9. If you’re in a retail business, try asking your provider for some links on their sites.
10. Try to get into Wikipedia. This does require good content and gives you a no follow link. But many people copy content from Wikipedia and leave the links.

Commenting on blogs is for people that are passionate about a topic and want to respond to the post of the blogger. By commenting regularly on blogs, you become part of the community. People will then see you as an important figure in the field and check out your brand/product/company. It is all about becoming part of that community. Not to mention the reputation you build for yourself by participating in comments.

Commenting on blogs takes time. It is not a one-two-three job of databases with blogs sorted by PR and topic, opening and typing a little “Great Post” in the comment box. Find a few blogs that interest you, read them regularly (or subscribe to them) and post something every few days. If you do this on a couple of blogs, you can build hundreds of links every month.

When commenting, keep in mind:

• Comments from No Follow blogs have value as well. Not only search for do follow blogs that can pass on link juice, but look for direct traffic as well.
• Become a regular poster in the same blogs. Chances are that you become an known figure in the community and receive more traffic from that blog.  Also, some blogs give fixed links to commenter with most comments in that month. This brings in another free link.
• Do not add any links in the comment body, unless your comment really can’t do without that link. Linking to your own blog is SPAM and these comments are often filtered and automatically deleted.
• Add your name in the Name field, or a short handle. Do not add a whole key phrase as anchor text.

Blog commenting is a very effective way of getting exposure and backlinks, but if it is going to be abused as reciprocal link exchanging and buying links, it will soon be dead. Either the blog owners will switch to nofollow links, or the search engines will place less importance on links in blog comments.  Let’s not abuse it.

The answer to all these questions can be given very simple; you don’t just need lots of them, the best, the most expensive. You need all of them!
Here is what you should NOT do while going out to get those links:

• Do not forget to check your internal links. All webmasters know that links are important. Some work hard to get those links, some focus on quantity, some on quality, but many fail to check their internal links. Internal links are the most important links on a site and what is more? You have them in control! Check if you used relevant anchor texts and positioning of those links.
• Do not forget to get some low PR links. Because everyone is looking for the quick fix and tries to get links from high PR sites, many webmasters forget to look on a long term basis. Those PR0 sites are very easy to give a link to you, and some of them will the PR4 and PR5 sites in the future. Besides that there are two more reasons to get the low PR links as well: PR0 is not nothing, it all counts. And it is more natural to have incoming links from all kind of PR sites.
• Do not forget your outgoing links. Don’t worry about PR juice leaking away. You can see it in two ways: each good article or statement shows the source of the information. And if you want to get something, you need to give something.
• Do not forget to monitor your inbound links. If you have done a links exchange, content exchange or bought a link or won a link, check regularly if it is still in place and if it is a real do follow link. When you have done a trade, don’t forget about it as soon as it is put up. Monitor your link partners.
• Do not use useless anchor texts. If you have the opportunity to choose an anchor text, use a relevant keyword for it. It is a big failure to just choose your URL or company name as anchor text. It is very likely that nobody is searching for that. Find out your keywords under which you want to rank and choose that as an anchor text where possible.
• Do not leave paid linking marks. Even though paid linking is not recommended, it still works in many cases and the temptation will always be there. Just make sure that you do not leave big marks behind that are easy to track. Do not make it too obvious that you are paying for links.
• Do not forget to check the relevance of a link. There is not much point in receiving links from totally unrelated websites. Try to focus on sites with a related or similar topic to get your links from. And get some real links from that site, not somewhere from the 20th page of their link exchange program. PR isn’t everything, relevance and positioning are.
• Do not add ‘no follow’ to your outgoing links. Just as you expect a genuine link to your site, you should give genuine links as well. PR juice is really not leaking to anywhere if your links are genuine. Only pages that consist of links only and are irrelevant to other pages will lose their PR very quickly, but this has nothing to do with a leak.

Link building is a very time consuming and frustrating job. Remember: nobody really likes it. You send out 100 emails, fill in tons of forms and receive only a handful of links back. That is the way it is, but if done right, it is totally worth it. Good links will last a long time.