Should you Submit Your Website To Web Directories?
By Anna Johnson on November 17th, 2010It may be ‘old school’ but submitting your site to certain web directories is still a worthwhile way to get inbound links as part of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Not only do many directories WANT to give you a link, but by submitting your site to directories you also get to determine the anchor text used to link to your website.
On the flip-side, there are a lot of junk directories that are not worth listing your website with. They’re either irrelevant to your niche or they lack much, if any ‘authority’ in they eyes of the search engines, thereby offering no help when it comes to boosting your search engine rankings.
So what web directories should you submit your site to? Here are some tips for what to look for – and what to avoid – when considering whether or not to submit your site to web directories…
Look for directories that:
- Are relevant to your website, based on such factors as location, industry, niche, topic and so on.
- Reside on highly authoritative top level domains (TLDs) such as .edu and .gov domains.
- Have a lot of pages indexed by the search engines;
- Have high Google PageRank, especially on the listing pages; and
- Have fewer than 100 links per listing page.
Avoid directories that:
- Have no relevance to your website;
- Are really just link farms;
- Contain links to suspect websites;
- Are full of broken links; and
- Contain lots of pop-up or pop-under ads.
