Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your search engine rankings. You can think of these links as votes in favor of you website (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high quality links for your site can be very time consuming, however it is a very important thing to do if you want to get great search engine rankings.

Before I continue, let me quickly define Link Popularity (link pop) for you. Link Popularity simply refers to the amount and quality of inbound links to your site. There are many free tools available on the internet for checking your link popularity.

How Link Directories Can Help You

Using link directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. A link directory is basically a web site which has a huge collection of links that are sorted by categories. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will use links directories as an alternative to doing a search engine query.

There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. I recently typed the keywords: link directories in to Google and received 1,120,000 hits.

When you submit your site to a link directory, it is edited by a human. Your submission will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of you site, and whether it is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines love links that point to your website from quality link directories.

You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are three reasons why you'll want to do this. First, you will get targeted traffic to your site when people search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will increase you search engine rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will help your web site pages to get indexed quickly.

Some Features Of Link Directories

When you submit to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look something like this: o Featured Links o Regular Links o Regular Links With Recipricol The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is always a charge for featured links (this is one of the ways that link exchanges make their money). The trouble here is that if a lot of people are buying featured links for a particular category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list. With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with recipricol are offered for free. When I submit to directories, I always choose regular links and I only choose free ones. Listen, there is such an overwhelming number of link directories out there, that if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly empty your bank account. There are countless free directories to choose from (just type free link directories into any search engine). Finally, always choose the regular link option (one way) rather than the reciprcol link option. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable that recipricol links (recipricol links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).

Link directories are ranked by Google just like any other web site. The range in page rank will be between 0 and 8. You will want to spread your submissions between all of the page rank values. This will make your links look more natural in the eyes of the search engines.

The Submission Process

There are basically three ways that you can carry out the submission process.

1. Sign in to your favorite search engine and type in "free link directories". You will get enough hits here to keep you busy with submitting for the rest of your days.

2. Purchase one of the many link directory submission software packages out there. These packages are normally semi-automated and will save you a huge amount of time.

3. You can pay someone to do the submitting for you. There are plenty of web sites that will offer to do your submissions for a fee, but be careful, as some of them are quite spammy. Be sure that you complete your due diligence. You should aim to do about 200 to 300 submissions per month.

Good luck with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories as a key strategy for gaining targeted traffic to your website.