When I speak of Directory Submissions I am referring to manually submitting your link to a Search Engine directory for the purpose of getting spidered, indexed and for obtaining backlinks to your own site. When you manually submit your link to a search engine directory and you do it in a manner that is natural or semi -automated that appears natural, you will eliminate the chance of tripping the search engine into believing that something about your submission or your site is un-natural.
If you are an Adsense Publisher, a benefit of manually submitting your link to the search engine directories is that you may get more value for a click on your site. This is because Google can tell the difference between natural site indexing methods and more forceful means like mega blog and ping. Google will reward the naturally indexed site with a higher value on a click versus a site that may not be so natural because they are trying to protect the click through to their clients websites. If your site is detected as using un-natural indexing or linking methods Google may penalize your site with lower value per click via smart pricing. Concerning blog and ping – it still does work – but it has to be done low key.
For the short time I have been an internet marketer, I have quickly realized that most of the hot ticket strategies to get sites indexed and/or get mega traffic in a flash come and go quickly because the search engines catch on and end up penalizing your site by either de-indexing it or reducing the value of a click from Adsense. So, I have started to play more by the rules, knowing that doing so will bring higher rewards down the line and my sites will stay around in the index longer.
This brings me back to directory submission. I consider it a must. It will bring the search engines to your site naturally and from there more traffic will come. You can get a better click value from Google Adsense. The only problem with Directory Submissions are that they require a lot of work. Think about submitting your site to 250+ directories using different titles, keywords and descriptions. Now what if you had 20 sites, or 50? You can see that you would be quickly overwhelmed just having to do all these submissions.
Well, thankfully there are options to help out. One option is to use a tool like Directory Site Submitter. The main thing this tool does is to automatically or manually (via a button click) fill out the Directory Submission online form containing your site’s information, its URL and your personal information (like email). All you have to do is fill out a captcha or something similar and then click “Submit”. This tool contains directory listings for over 400 directories and more are added periodically. The directory listings are sortable by Pagerank as well, so you can target higher PR sites first if you like. So, you load up several of your sites information into the tool and when you navigate to the correct page of the Directory site your info is automatically filled out! Its a real time saver.
Another option is to outsource Directory Submissions to a reputable company. I recommend using the company that is affiliated with SEO2020, since I have used them in the past and they provided excellent service.
If you choose to manually submit your site to the Search Engine directories yourself, either one site at a time or by using Directory Site Submitter, be careful how you do it. Only submit to a few sites per day. And vary the anchor text link, title and description of your site information. Directory Site Submitter can help you do this because it provides you fields for multiple keywords, titles and site descriptions.
My next post will discuss getting backlinks by blog commenting and trackbacks so stay tuned!
To your success,
Greg
[tags]directories, directory site submission, indexing, Adsense, search engines, search engine directories, backlinks[/tags]