So you've finished your website masterpiece and want nothing more than spreading out the word and receiving tons of traffic as soon as possible? Now you might think of a way of a good way to drive traffic to your website in no time. What could it be? Article submissions? Press releases? Link exchanges? Sure! But each an every method requires a huge amount of work and most of all... time! Imagine those countless hours of writing articles or trying to formulate an effective press release. Requesting link exchanges will even be more time consuming. Some website owners might just laugh at you because you have no pagerank or significant traffic while others take ages until they put up that single link to your website.



I have been there and done it all! I don't even want to count the hours that I've spent for registering with the different article websites or emailing webmasters. I've always tried to figure out a way to get indexed in the search engines as soon as possible and to get a good pagerank in no time. Then, one day, I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel: Directory submissions. Now please don't immediately think of those free for all (FFA) links pages that will place your link on the frontpage for like 5 minutes or so. I mean well established link directories, websites that are really effective for getting your site indexed fast.

The good thing with link directories is that you practically have to do nothing but submit your website link, a title, short description and some keywords. Of course you also have to select a category under which your website should be filed, but even that is no problem at all as most link directories have a comprehensive list of categories available. When you have submitted your website it will most of the time be reviewed by a human editor. This might sound like a bottleneck at first, but when you think about all those crappy websites that don't get listed because of the spam techniques they use, (remember those FFA link pages) it is absolutely an advantage!

Getting your site listed at link directories can be extremely easy if you follow some simple rules.

When build your website make sure that it doesn't look like it was put together in 30 minutes or like it was made by a 5 year old. It's really the quality that counts and that gets you eventually listed. If you now think: "Oh no, I have no chance to even get a single listing!", then let me tell you that you shouldn't worry so much. An easy way to find out what requirements your site has to fulfil to get listed is to browse through some of the directory listings and have a look at the websites that are already included. You might laugh out loud when you see some of them - not because they look crappy (OK, some even might), but because they are kept pretty simple and clean. I guarantee you that if you are serious about website building and use a good software and/or design you should not have to worry at all. Of course it is always a must to read the directory guidelines to see whether your site qualifies for a listing or not (e. g. there's no suitable category available).

Some link directories might require to put a link back to them on your site, a so called reciprocal link. It could either be a simple link, some more advanced HTML stuff (don't worry, you can copy & paste the code almost all of the time) or graphics. The benefit the link directories get from that is that when your website finally gets some good traffic and has high search engine listings some of your visitors might find their way to the link directory itself. Also it will give the link directories some pagerank when your site has lots of backlinks (and you WILL get them by submitting to link directories). Make sure to put up those reciprocal links before you submit to the directories as some of them might instantly check for it and possibly reject your site.

If you follow these guidelines and make sure that you have some good!!! and search engine optimized content on your website (not just dozens of pages of keywords and spam), then you will have no problems at all in getting listed with the link directories, getting picked up by the search engines and profiting from the floods of traffic. I personally do directory submissions almost daily and most of the time manage to get picked up by the link directories at the first try (sometimes I do some stupid mistakes by submitting a website and having misspelled the title or URL because of too much caffeine in my blood). As far as the traffic results are concerned I am more than satisfied. Lots and lots of my websites have TOP 10 listings in all of the search engines and have brought me significant traffic and product sales.

The best thing of all is that you don't even have to manually search for those link directories by yourself. I use a software called Link Directory Submitter that does most of the work for me. I should be ashamed for my laziness, but I'd rather prefer to spend more hours lying in the sun and drinking Margaritas than submitting links for hours. To be honest, with automated software like Link Directory Submitter I could submit an army of websites in no time but hey, I'd also have to build them. Now that's a vicious circle!