Directory submissions have been around since the Yahoo! directory went live in the early 1990′s. The crawler based search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing ( MSN ) recognize links from top Internet directories. Passing the review process by one of the editors of the top directories is like a approval stamp and vouches for your website quality. Getting your site listed in the DMOZ (Open Directory) and the Yahoo! directory is a sure way to gain trust and link popularity. No wonder, web directories and e-zine directories are popping up all over the web trying to make money off the directory and article submissions hype.

In recent years, directory submission and article submissions have become the new favorite scheme of many unscrupulous inattentive webmasters to gain link popularity. The search engines have answered back with an even tighter scrutiny of links coming from new article and junky directory sites. The hardest part of directory and article submission is too weed out the hundreds of low quality directories from the really valuable ones that actually will make a difference in your ranking. With hundreds of low quality directories competing for your submission dollars, it’s a really a though job to decide where to put your money for maximum ROI.

What to look for during directory submission

Following are some of the most important criteria to take into consideration during directory submission:

• How difficult is it to get a listed? The easier directory submission process the more spammy sites the directory will likely contain. This can affect the “link power” you can gain from getting listed. Getting listed in the DMOZ or Yahoo! directory is tougher for a good reason. The editors are selective about the sites they let into their directory submission. The higher the barrier to enter a directory, the more valuable your link will become( more likely but not a directory submission rules). however don’t get fool, many directory with absolutely no value have a tough directory submission process and even high price.

• What types of sites are listed in the directory? You can get a sense of the sites listed in a directory by visiting Bing.com and entering the command: “linkfromdomain:directory.com.” If you see a lot of sites in the search results you would not want to be associated with, don’t submit your listing.

• What is the age of the directory? The older the directory the better. Newer directories have a very low trust factor on the search engines, and your link on the directory pages may not be given any substantial link reputation.

• What is the Google PageRank of the directory? The higher PR the better obviously, but don’t stop at the home page. Look deep in the category pages if the Google PageRank is distributed to all the internal category pages as well.

• Are you able to specify your own keywords in the link anchor text? This is probably one of the most important factors in directory submissions. If you can’t specify your own anchor text to use in the directory link you may not gain as much keyword relevance from the link.

• Are the links in the directory static and passing the Google PageRank and Link Reputation? There are few directory submission sites that don’t play by the rules and charge a significant amount of money for links that are simply useless because they contain a “nofollow” tag or are JavaScript based.

• Do the Title tags of the category pages where your link is placed match closely your websites theme? Take a look at the Title tag of the page where you are considering submitting your site, does the Title contain at least a few of your main target keywords, if not, look elsewhere for your directory submission or suggest a new category.

• How many unique inbound links can be found to the directory? The higher number of unique links pointing to the directory the better and the higher your chance of getting a decent amount link reputation out of your directory submission.

• Are you able to add a description to your link? A great description of your site can substantially increase the click through rate of your link in the directory, so aim for a persuasive description emphasizing a few benefits.

• Are you able to submit multiple links under one listing? It’s a big plus to get few more links from the same directory submission with different link anchor text, but it’s not an absolute necessity.

• Are there more than 50 links on a category page? Too many links on a single page dilutes the effectiveness of your own link, so check carefully and demand another page if the directory tries to put your link on a page with too many links.

• Are there other directories on the same Class IP address? A trick from the early days of SEO when webmasters placed several sites on the same server and aggressively interlinked them. This trick is no longer working, so stay away from directories hosted on the same server cluster.

• Can you enhance your listing by purchasing category sponsorship? It’s nice to sometimes have some control over where your link is placed. With a feature listing you can jump to the top of your selected category. However be carefull where and how you spend your money, as we said earlier you can easily end up spending thousands of dollar ( even tens of thousand ) with no result.

• If you are looking for additional traffic, does the target directory’s Alexa rank justify the submission costs? A somewhat reliable traffic measurement tool is the Alexa Traffic Rankings for gauging traffic to any website you don’t have direct access to, but still would like to know how popular it is. A web master related site with a ranking around 20 thousand could get about 500 unique visitors a day.

Directory submission preparations:

When submitting your link to any directory, you will be asked for some basic information about your site.
As a minimum most directories require the following submission information about your site:

• URL — This may be your home page URL, but some directories also allow you to submit your internal pages for deep linking.

• Title —  This will be the anchor text of the link to your site so choose your keywords carefully and try to minimize the use of stop words like “and, in, the, with, etc.”

• Description — This will be the description below your link. It’s important to have some of the keywords from the title of your link present here.

• Keywords —  This should match closely the keywords you optimized your website home page content.  Don’t use keywords here that are not used on your site.

• Category —  You will most likely not find an exact category to submit your site to, and the categories vary from directory to directory. In these cases, try to enter a search phrase that matches your website’s keyword focus into the directory’s search box. In some cases your competitors are already listed in the directory, and you may want to look up the category they are listed in to help you decide on the most appropriate category.

Prepare the content of these submission fields in a text file for easy copy and pasting when it comes time to submit your link to the directories. You should use the same information for the directory submission in as many as 5–6 directories, but after that use different anchor text targeting different URLs for the next 5–6 submissions. Some directories may not allow you to change the URL pointing to your internal pages, but you should try in any case.

It may save you some time to fill out link submission forms automatically with a handy web browser based tool like RoboForm.

Niche directories and trade directories:

If you have followed our example in the Link Popularity Analysis lesson to find links to your competitors’ sites, you may have come across links that are from trade directories or loosely related categories of link pages. These are excellent submission opportunities to get your own site listed in as long as the theme of the directory matches your site’s theme. You can use the search engines to find the most appropriate directories for submission.

Try this on Google: “import car parts” + “directory.” When the query results show up, there will be a lot of directory sites such as business.com and alibaba.com. You can try the same search query with your own keywords and simply add directory and another time directory submission to the end of the search phrase.

The manual search can work well, but the faster way to find these niche directories is to use some SEO tool keyword search in combination with “Link Suggestion Form Search Terms.” The reason this approach works well is because the directory submission pages contain search terms like these: “add a site,” “suggest a site,” “and submit your site”, “directory submission” etc.

Basically 3 step for directory submission are:

• search for directories
• Find web directories where your site should be listed
• Submit your link to the selected directories

Are you a good writer? Do you know your market segment inside out? If the answer is yes, then nothing should stop you from creating more valuable content for the web, but this time with a twist. Instead of uploading your new web pages to your site, you will submit them as articles to major e-zine sites so they can publish them for you. You may be already wondering why you would want to give away high quality content to “complete strangers” for nothing in return.Aha, but what if we told you there is something in it for you as well. You get to insert your own “resource box” at the bottom of your articles. What is a “resource box? It’s a mini bio of you and a small description of your business with a link back to your site. In many cases, you have complete control over the “anchor” text and the URL you choose to link back to on your site. This is a great way to increase the “deep link ratio” of your link popularity.
Isn’t this a good deal? We think so, providing you follow our simple step by step guide on how to write your articles and how to submit them and most importantly where to submit them.It’s a win-win deal for you and the article publishers as well. The article publishing directories need your content for their members to read so they can monetize your articles with advertising space surrounding your articles, and you also gain some direct traffic, but most importantly you increase your site’s link popularity. In some cases the search engines may even rank the article at the top of the search results or at least in the top 10 if enough people find it useful. They may even point links to your article.

A well written article is not an infomercial for your website

The writing style for articles is much different from writing website content. The articles that get the most views on e-zine sites are those that help the reader solve problems and provide answers to their questions. Striking the right cord with your readers will make or break your articles. If your article smells like a sales copy, your readers may not even finish the first paragraph.

You have to ensure your article stays on topic without ever talking about your product or services directly. It’s not an easy task, but if you want your articles to be approved by the e-zine editors you have to follow their rules. This means no blatant advertising and self promotion allowed.

The structure of your articles

Article writing is not magic, but there are some rules you have to follow to have great success with them, here are the most important ones:

• Article Title should be a maximum 110 characters including all spaces and hyphens, which is about 12 words or less. Make the title catchy, but at the same time think of incorporating your keywords into them. This will become the title of the actual page as well where your article is published. Good title tags are intriguing and memorable. Try using these words in your title: “how to,” “top 10 reasons,” “the truth about…”
• Abstract or Summary Description can be a maximum of about 500 characters. There are no hard rules on how many words the abstract should contain, but about 60–70 words should be more than enough. Make the abstract an enticing intro to your article that hooks the publisher and spurs them to read on.
• Keywords should be a collection of words that appears in your articles the most frequently. The formatting of the keywords is very similar to the META keywords on your web pages, which are comma separated.
• Article Body should be about 600-800 words long, but it depends a great deal on the publishers’ requirements. Some publishers want in depth articles of over 2,000 words. You have to experiment with the most suitable article length for your topics, but don’t try to box yourself into a specific rule for article length.
  • Your article should be written with no HTML formatting as most article submission sites may not accept HTML formatted articles. If you have written your articles in Microsoft Word, convert them to plain text prior to submission.
  • Include your main keywords in your articles similar to the way we have discussed in the Page Optimization lesson.
  • No advertorials, or blatant self promotion allowed in the article body.
  • No links in the article body to your own site or affiliate sites, but text links that are not formatted as “live” links may be allowed to resource sites in the body.
• Resource Box should contain about 30–40 words. This is where you can talk about yourself and your business preferably in the third person. Provide no more than 2 live links to your site, at least one of them should be formatted with your website address as the anchor text, in case the publisher doesn’t allow “live links.” A live link is a clickable link and not simply text. Here is an example of a “live link,”s http://avaplex.com and this is a non “live link” www.avaplex.com.

An example of a good article ready for submission

Here is an example of how to create a framework for a well written article and getting it published. Let’s suppose you own a golf training camp for young people, and you want to write a 700 word article that explains the best way to select a golf camp. Your target audience will be most likely the parents of teenagers, so your article must convince them a golf camp is the right choice for their children over a few hours of private lessons.

Your article title will be “Golf Camps—The Right Choice For Your Teen!.”

• Your article must describe the differences between private golf instructions and golf camps in general.
• Your article also must emphasize the benefits of instructors getting to know their students and identifying their personal weaknesses and strengths.
• The article also has to address every parent’s concern about the safety of the children while away from home.
• The article must talk about the organizations that certify golf camps and how the parents should check for references.
• A camp should also provide other fun activities for young people to participate in such as water sports, team sports and other types of recreations.
• And finally you will create a resource box with two links to our website, one of the links will be the actual URL of the website.

As you can see article writing is not magical, but it must have the right focus while staying clear of promotional language. We can offer you another piece of valuable advice. When you write your articles, speak out loud as you write them. We guarantee your articles will sound more natural and be easier to read.

Submitting your articles

The hardest, and most time consuming part of article distribution is the initial set up of the logins and the actual e-zine directory site selection. Be prepared to spend a minimum of two hours on submitting to about a dozen directories and that’s with the use of “RoboForm”, which helps us automatically fill article submission forms with our article content, resource box, and keywords. Although only about 30–40 articleare worth submitting to, it can be still a challenge to find enough time for article writing and submission. directories out of the close to 500

So, let’s start discussing the article directory selection process first. Most of the selection criteria that apply to directories also apply to e-zine sites, so instead of repeating them, see it at top of this page. Having said that, there are some subtle differences in how we rate article directories vs. general directories. In the case of article directories, the estimated traffic we may get directly matters a great deal more since we actually want our articles to be found and read by humans as well, not just the search engines. Therefore, the most important submission factor to us, as content providers is the ability to insert live links back to our sites from the e-zine sites.

Comprehensive article directory list

In the past few years we have collected over 400 article directory sites, and we have used the Links Plus+ tool to gather all the necessary data to rank them based on their Google PageRank, Yahoo! link popularity, Alexa ranking, and the article directory’s age.

Once again we had to rely on the not so accurate Google PageRank and the somewhat skewed Alexa rankings to get some sense of popularity for a particular article directory. The article directory rankings based on these factors will not be 100% accurate, but it’s still a very good gauge for us to consider whether or not we should even bother submitting our articles.

Conclusion

Directory and article submission are still very effective means of getting new and well established sites promoted. It should be in every web master’s web promotional arsenal. However, directory submissions are very tricky as new directories are popping up almost daily and deciding which ones are worthy of your submission dollars is a real challenge. Links from new directories are scrutinized by the search engines and heavily discounted, so submitting to well established older directories is the way to go. With some careful planning and using our checklist in this lesson you should be able to maximize your submission dollars and time spent on directory submission and article publishing projects. Even if you don’t consider yourself a good writer you should research topics well suited for your website’s audience and hire a freelance or “ghost” writer to write your articles on your behalf. Here are a few places where you may want to look for hiring article writers: Getafreelancer.com and eLance.com.