by Julia Ramyalg, 11/10/2006
If you are a web site owner and do its SEO and promotion by yourself, you know that search engines bring huge traffic, and you do your best to climb the top of the search results. You know that quality text content and proper meta tags are very important, and you know how important are links which lead to your web site from other sites. There are several ways of getting links for your web site and submission to web directories is one of them.
1. Why submission to web directories is a powerful tool for your web site promotion?
Web directory is a web site that accepts web sites listings categorized into categories and sub-categories. When you submit your site to a web directory, a link to your web site is added. As you know, link popularity is an important factor for high rankings. When your link is placed on a page with good PR this is a plus to your web site link popularity, because your web site gets 'piece' of the page's PR. The more links your web site has the higher your rankings in search engines but the links must be natural - i.e. relevant and one-way.
Yes, few years ago for high rankings in search engines it was enough just to exchange links with other web sites. Nowadays Google recognizes such schemes and considers these links not natural, and discounts their value in web site popularity and PR calculation. Reciprocal link exchange can still be used as way to get visitors to your web site if you exchange links with good high traffic web sites, but for building ranking one-way natural links are needed.
The links must be SEO-friendly: static, direct, and without 'nofollow' attribute; they must be on a page that has some PR, surrounded by text content related to your web site theme and not more than 30 other web sites links. More links on a page will devaluate "piece" of PR your web site gets from the page.
Web directory that offers such links is called SEO friendly web directory and is really worth even paying some small amount for submission because your link will be found and indexed by search engines in just a couple of days and it will be a "plus" to your web site link popularity.