Marketing through search engines provides two opportunities for businesses: paid search / pay-per-click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) / Search Engine Placement. With many offerings, and little cohesion the search engine marketing industry is open to much criticism through the lack of knowledge that buyers have of the industry.



The purpose of directory submission is somewhat different from how a layman may interpret it. Yes, it provides direct traffic through links, however the main advantage of directory submission and where the return on investment is gained, comes in the form of the hyper-links to the company website. These links are indexed by search engines and therefore result in the search engines increasing the position of the website that has links pointing towards it.

However, like everything to do with internet marketing, it is not that simple. The links have to be formatted in a particular way to offer the greatest increase in search engine positioning.

Your description should contain keywords that will help search engine traffic come across your website. If your website offers “dog training tips" then include words such as “dog training info", “dog training", “how to train your dog" within any description the directory allows you to include.

Check the formatting of the link where your website will be placed. For best results, the link URL will be formatted like www.example.com/web_design_companies_11.htm rather than with a “question mark" within the URL. Also, check the google page rank of the homepage and internal pages to get an indication of the results you will attain from the link. Please remember that a link from a PR0 page still has a PR of at least the dampening factor, and may even be nearer to PR1.

Remember that you should include “www" on every link. If you enter the URL example.com instead of www.example.com then this could lead to poorer results in the search engine results pages.

Decide upon anchor text that will represent terms that you would like traffic to find you with through the search engine results pages. If for example your company retails “software" then use “Software Shop" or “Software Retailer" as your anchor text.

Directory submission is a service that provides almost certain results for businesses. Businesses are finding that through submitting to 500 directories, a Google Page Rank of 3 could be the result, as well as direct traffic.