One of the most useful ways to bring visitors to your website, and boost the search engine rankings to your website, is to use regular link building work.
One of the strongest ways to build valid incoming links is to post your links in relevant categories in multiple online link directories. Though your meta tag optimization is important to the search engine spiders, the spiders also look at how valuable you are to other users online.
The spiders want to see your site as a reference site that can be used to help web searchers in a significant way. So you must understand that meta tag optimization, keyword use within relevant and unique content, and link building are the key components to help to market your website.
To understand how free directories can work for you, you must understand how search engines work. Their main purpose is to provide searchers find the best source available for the information that they are looking for. When the search engines try to determine why your site might be valid, the look at a few different factors.
They look at your meta tags and keywords, they look at your content, they look for keywords in your URL, and they look at the links in your site pointing to other pages, and the links pointing to your site from other pages. It is really very simple. You just want to create a site that when taken with that previously described snapshot, satisfies the search engines.
Different search engines value different factors. Some of them value links more, while others value your onpage optimization with meta tags and content. But overall links are usually the most valuable. If you have good quality links pointing to your site, you can cause your website to rank very high in the search engines. If you keep your link building campaign consistent and deliberate, you will be rewarded.
Many people do not realize that there is a truly valuable source of link building available to them. Free web directories provide a great place to display your link in a relevant category. In addition, this shows the search engine that you are a resource for the information on your site. Just do a search engine search to find a list of “free web directories.” You will find several sources that will list them for you.
One important thing to keep in mind is that most of these directories are also link exchanges. You want to be careful with that. Most link exchanges will ask you to put a possibly irrelevant link on your website linking back to the exchange. Unfortunately, this could reduce your own site rankings. If you link out to anything from your site, you should only be linking to sites that have content relevant to your own site.
Adding a non relevant link simply just boosts the link exchange site credits. Some experts say that you should not put any reciprocal links on your site at all, but different people have different opinions on the matter. There have been sites that have achieved great ranking using relevant reciprocal linking methods, so it really is up to you.
When you are ready to start submitting to free directories, it will probably be tempting to use a directory submission service, or a program. But you really should not do this.
If you do this you have no real control over how your information is uploaded to the directory and if it meets the guidelines – not regarded as spam. It is best to submit your site to 3 or more directories a day by hand, and with care. The search engines will recognize this as more natural and reward you if you do this as well.
Before you choose your directory, make sure it has a decent page rank on the search engines 2 and up, and that it does not look like a piece of junk with a bunch of advertisements.
Some of the search engines will categorize your site, as being a resident of a bad web neighborhood, and will not reward your site for being associated with sites and services that do not use useful tactics to get you better page rankings.
Before you start this process, you should understand that it will take some time to build the links you want, and in the beginning some of the higher ranking directories will not accept you, so get listed in whatever reputable ones you can. Also know that it may take a few days for some sites to review your links.