Chapter 4: The “How To” of effective link building with directory submissions -----------------------------------------

Keyword optimization is the most important part of directory submissions. After all, you’re submitting to directories so that you can:
1. Get targeted traffic
2. Improve your search engine rankings
By following some simple steps, you can get the best of submission efforts!

To optimize for your keywords with directory submissions, prepare 10-15 keywords related to your niche which are tightly targeted and very relevant. You can use keyword research tools like wordtracker, keyworddiscovery, or the Google adwords keyword research tool if you don’t know which keywords to use.

TIP: When you submit your website to directories, make sure that you optimize for your target keywords by using keyword rich titles as well as relevant surrounded text (ie. description and tags). This way, you will get backlinks from relevant pages as well as a keyword-focused link. This will help your website to rank better for the keywords that you use during your directory submissions.

Take a look at an example of the keyphrase that we optimized for while submitting to directories. We used “Diamonds & Jewelry buying guide” as the title while submitting to a few directories. After the submissions were reviewed, we received some links with the anchor text as “Diamonds & Jewelry buying guide” that pointed to our example website: www.webtrify.com

After Google indexed the links that we received in different directories, you can see the results here:

 

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Google result for “Diamonds & Jewelry buying guide” after 2 weeks of submission!

A few directories ask for “tag keywords” when you submit your website. If a directory asks for “tags”, use relevant keywords that describe your website, that way you may receive additional keyword targeting benefits from the “tag” pages of the directory. As an example, take a look at the Mastermoz directory >www.mastermoz.com

You will see some tags on the homepage where you can search for a website by clicking on the tags.

 

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MozTags! – You can get more and relevant links by choosing proper tags while submissions

Take a look at “tag cloud” above. By selecting tags that accurately represent your website, you’ll get links from different tag pages. This, again, can help with the keyword targeting of your website.
Vary Titles: When you submit your website to different directories, make sure to vary your website titles. In order to get the biggest benefit out ofdirectory submissions, you’ll want to use multiple keywords in the titles. Besides, if you use the exact same title for hundreds of directory submissions, it looks very unnatural to search engines, which is something that should be avoided.
Vary Descriptions: The same rule applies with the descriptions; you should vary your descriptions with submissions. In fact, if you mix and match your titles and descriptions, this looks more natural to search engines.
Submit your website to older directories: As you might know, search engines like older directories. It’s always better to submit your website to older and established directories rather than brand new directories. You can find the age of directory simply by checking the “whois” information for the domain. There are many free websites where you can check the age of a website, and you can find them by doing a search for “Domain whois” in your favorite search engine (without the quotes). One of the more popular whois tools iswhois.domaintools.com.
1. For example, if you want to check age of thehttp://mastermoz.com/ domain, then you’ll find the whois information by visiting >> whois.domaintools.com/mastermoz.com or >>
http://whois.domaintools.com/mastermoz.com

2. For our example, we find that the domain was registered in 2004, and it’s written as Created: 2004-12-06.

 

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Whois Record to Get Idea on Age of Domain

3. However, this is only when the domain was registered. We don’t know for sure when the directory was added to the website, but we can find out that information by using another tool, the Web Archive. >> http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
4. Searchwww.mastermoz.com in the above tool and you’ll get the following results >> http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mastermoz.com
5. From the result you can find how the domain looked at certain points in time. Using the whois info we know that the domain was registered in 2004, but the directory is first recorded as being online in April of 2007. This Web Archive tool will let you browse through the different time periods to look at how the website changed over time.

Web archives of MasterMoz directory (Directory started around Apr. 14 according to record)!

 

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Using the above tools, you can decide whether a web directory (or a website) is older and established or not. And, this will help you to gauge whether a directory is worth getting links from.

 

Get Links From Relevant Directories/Resources: You can get niche directory lists by visiting popular directory lists. We will discuss “How to find niche directories” in chapter 7

Don’t get links from directories that have NO Value: I have noticed some people who buy expired domains with a high Page Rank and then install a directory script and create a new directory. After that, they announce it to directory resources and forums as a paid directory with a minor review/inclusion fee. Many website owners, those who don’t know this game, submit their website to these directories thinking that they’ve purchased a backlink from a “high PR, well established” directory at a really good price. I highly advise website owners to avoid submitting their websites to directories based on Page Rank alone, especially paid links. Something that you can check easily – if there aren’t many pages of the directory in Google’s index, even though it’s a high PR directory, you should be leery of this.

Don’t submit to directories that use NO-Follow links: Many directories provide free inclusion into their directories but use the “no-follow” tag when linking your website. The biggest benefit for directory submission is SEO, and even though you can receive human visitors from the submissions, it is not recommended at all to submit to directories that use the “no-follow” tag unless you know firsthand that they provide a decent amount of human traffic. You can identify “no-follow” links rather easily.

• If you’re using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you can simply select the HTML text link, right click and check the page source of particular section by clicking “View section source”. For example, take a look screenshot on next page:

If you find tag like.

 

rel="external nofollow" or rel=”nofollow”

 

in the source code, that means the directory is using no-follow tags and it will not pass any SEO value to your website at all.

 

Here’s what we see in the new window by viewing the source of the above example:

 

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" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.vxdate.com/asian-speed-dating.php" title="VXdate Asian Speed Dating" target="_blank">VXdate Asian Speed Dating</a>

 

Since there is no mention of rel=”nofollow” or the like and you can see the proper website URL in the source, you are getting a direct HTML link to your website; these types of links are SEO friendly.

 

View Sourcecode uing Mozilla Firefox

 

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• If you’re using the internet explorer browser, you will have to view the source of the whole page and look for the particular link and check to be sure that the no-follow tag isn’t attached. You can view the source code clicking on View > Source from the top menu as shown below.

View Sourcecode Using Internet Explorer

 

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