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. Just so you know, a link directory is a web site that has a large collection of links which are organized by topic. 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 for doing 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 plenty of free ones to choose from (just type free link directories into Google, and you will be amazed at the numbers). A final note here is always choose the regular link (one way) as opposed to the recipricol 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. Make sure to do your due diligence first. 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.
Author: John Baril - I live in Delta, British Columbia, Canada with my wife and 2 young boys. I am a full time Paramedic and I love my career. In my spare time, I may be found flying, hiking, renovating our house or playing sports with the boys. Check out my affiliate marketing website: http://www.wealth-dynamo.com
Originally posted here:
One Way Linking Strategies Using Link Directories
by Jennifer Laycock
One of the most common mistakes I see being made by folks who are new to search engine optimization is a lack of focus on attracting deep links. These people will work hard to gain new links to their sites by submitting to directories, joining organizations and filling out profiles on social networks, but they often fail to focus on getting good quality links to the inner pages of their web sites. But new data released by Jacob Nielsen shows just how important those deep links are.
BBC News had an article over the weekend that talked about the data from one of Jakob Nielsen’s studies on how Internet users surf the web. His findings confirmed what most link building gurus have been telling folks for ages. It’s essential to build strong links to the internal pages of your web site.
The article reports:
There has also been a big change in the way that people get to the places where they can complete pressing tasks, he said.
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
That tells us two things.
1.) You need to make sure ALL pages of your web site are ranking well so people find their way straight to the page that best fits what they are looking for when they run a search.
and
2.) You need to be building deep links to all pages of your site with good content so those pages will rank well and so direct link traffic ends up exactly where they want to be.
It’s easy enough to fall into the trap of only building links to a home page. For most sites that are new to search engine optimization, the home page is the easiest one to rank. At the same time, when you’re just starting off with link building, it tends to be easiest to get those front page links from the directories and sites you’ve been neglecting.
The trick is not to get lazy.
Once you’ve built that foundation (or better yet, WHILE you’re building that foundation) start branching out and building links to the inner pages of your site. Create fantastic product copy and find ways to promote those individual product pages. Build a blog and use the easy-to-publish format to offer information and insight into the topics near and dear to your heart. Creating killer content throughout your site is a great way to make sure you start naturally attracting deep links.
Beyond that, make sure you’re controlling what you can control. If you have social networking accounts, consider linking back to a favorite post or article on your web site instead of to your main URL. If you’re leaving a comment on someone’s blog and they allow you to leave links, consider linking back to a post you’ve made that is relevant to the topic you are commenting on. Check your internal link structure. There’s no rule that says the only links on your site are in your navigation. If you have content on one page that talks about content on another page, include a link.
Users have shown time and time again they want to cut to the chase and get straight to the content they want. Your job as a site owner or marketer is to help them accomplish that goal.
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Excerpt from:
Deep Links: Web Users Want What They Want and They Want it Now!