Directories help you rank by linking to your site. This works because most modern search engines calculate your page's worth and ranking within their index based on links. Though links generally aren't the only factor when trying to rank a site, they are a significant one. When submitting to directories its important to remember that search engines will analyze the anchor text, description, importance of the directory page, and age of the link.



Before you begin any campaign to rank within search engines you should do plenty of research on your keywords. Using various keyword suggestion tools will give you a good idea of the phrases that are commonly searched. Sometimes you'll be quite surprised what comes up! Keep the top 5 or so keyword phrases in mind as you go read the rest of this article.

Search engines will be analyzing the anchor text, which is one of the reasons you'll need a good knowledge of your best keyword phrases. When you submit to a search engine it's important to rotate the anchor text so that you don't have some hundreds of links with identical structures. That many links all pointing to one site is obvious spam to any search engine. Rotate between the top 3 search phrases for your specific domain. Every once and a while use the 4th or 5th place search phrases. This will make your gain in directory presence look to be more natural and therefore worth more to the search engines.

The description of your directory listing is also important. Google and Yahoo can detect surrounding text, and will associate that descriptive text with your link which is what you want. However just like above when we noted that having hundreds of links with the same 3 words is spam, having hundreds of identical 30 word descriptions just can't be natural. Try to use 5 different descriptions and rotate them. Make sure to use keyword phrases from your research above (try not to use the same keywords as you do in your anchor text). This gives your directory link and description a good level of keyword density.

Deep linking is an important part of any link building campaign and is not to be overlooked. It would be incredibly unusual for a site with very good content to never get any links to it. So while submitting to directories link to a few of your main sub-sections, this increases the natural look of your link profile. The same rules to creating anchor text and descriptions apply here.

All directories are not created equal and that's a fact many don't remember in their pursuit of rank. Look where your link will be placed within a directory before you put it there. Recently in a link building campaign I purchased an expensive (100$ or so) submission at a directory. After a few weeks I happened to go back to this directory to submit another website. I browsed to the section where I had submitted my last link and realized that link was barely worth anything. The page had about 80 outgoing links, and a PR of 1. While PR is generally not a good way to check whether a site is worth a directory submission or not, you still want to see at least a 3 when you're paying that much money. So as a good rule of thumb check where your link is will be placed go before you submit.

Google likes old sites and it like old links too. Quite often you won't see your links giving anything back till around 6 months down the line when they've escaped from the infamous sandbox. Link age should also vary or it won't look natural, this is one way in which directories work quite well. The standard directory process of reviewing sites before inclusion takes between a day and a few months to fully process. This allows your links to have a varied appearance age wise.

Directory submissions are a great way to create good quality links at cost. These links can generally be formatted to fit our needs as webmasters; after all we are the main client base of nearly every directory. Follow the basic anchor, and descriptive text rotation techniques and you'll assuredly see the results.