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 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.

• An SEO expert analyses your website. In order to do an effective job, he needs to really understand your website, know how it is structured and what the important webpages are. The expert needs to get a clear picture of the site as a whole.
• A good SEO company will conduct a keyword analysis to find the most relevant keywords for the website, to see which keywords are searched for and could drive targeted traffic. Also competitiveness should be analyzed. There are some less competitive keywords that still drive a lot of traffic, but could be easier to optimize for.
• Then the SEO expert will check the rankings of the website under the targeted keywords found in the previous analysis. This is to see where the site is ranking well and where not, so that the expert can see which areas need more attention then others.
• The websites that are currently in the top positions of the targeted keyword searches should then be checked out; what is their structure, title, number and quality of backlinks, etc. In other words, finding out how they got to that top ranking.
• The expert will have a look at the most important landing pages of your site and evaluate the content of it. Factors as keyword density and keyword prominence are included in the evaluation. Pages might have to be re-written.
• An SEO company also looks at the coding of the site. Search Engines see the website from a totally different point of view than the visitors, but this should be synchronized as much as possible.
• Before barging on a course of changes, the SEO expert will have to give an overview of his findings and make recommendations to optimize page elements, coding, meta tags, etc. This way it can be established that the SEO is working in the right direction and following the objectives of the client.
• Internal and External link structure are a major factor in the search engine’s algorithms. The SEO expert will examine your internal linking and start an external link building campaign with creative ways to build highly relevant incoming links.

An SEO expert will regularly track results of the implemented strategies, update the ranking reports, reflect on them and if necessary make new recommendations. It is also the task of an SEO expert to keep up to date on search engine rule changes and competitive site rank changes and respond to that.
SEO is an ongoing process and has most benefits if handled as a whole. Your SEO expert should have a good insight in all the factors and changes involved and implement strategies accordingly.

Those days are long gone now and SEO has become a very time consuming and complicated ongoing process now. Google continuously updates the SERPs now, instead of monthly. And more and more off-page factors are included in the algorithm that are harder to manipulate by the webmasters.

There are hundreds of SEO companies offering services as directory submissions, link building, content writing and more. These companies can be divided into different types: the good ones and the ones that want to make some quick money. Some make big promises on the rankings. Some are still trying to fool Google with tricks. But luckily there are also honest SEO experts that understand that SEO in not instant any more and are prepared to start the long battle to achieve rankings.

Your SEO expert will be in it for the long haul and will look at many factors. You have to be prepared to work on different factors for a long time without any quick results. You need to be serious about your website and prepared to be in it for the long haul as well. Your SEO expert will guide you in the changes that you need to make and help you optimizing your website for success.