It is very well known that online directories play an important role when it comes to off-page optimization, the quality of the links, the anchor text, the category and page title is placed on are all factors that help increase the weight of your site. According to many inexperienced submitters online directories are dead however, this is not true. Online directories can be excellent tools if they are used properly, let's go ahead and take a look at some of the steps you should follow in order to get the most out of Web directories. Inbound Links For the most part, page rank, traffic and positioning on the search engine result pages are heavily influenced by the amount and quality of inbound links, SEO has become to some extent a competition amongst webmasters who are constantly fighting and thinking of new ways to acquire links that other sites may not be able to. Identifying which directories are worth submitting to is the first stept you should take, even before you decide what keywords you are going to focus on, pay close attention to the number of ads and the placement within the pages, the number of outbound links within a category, the existence of subcategories, age of the site and design. These are all characteristics that will help you determine which directory is worth submitting to. Anchor Texts The number of directories available today is staggering, after running a quick search on Google you can come up with over a thousand directories without putting much effort. Getting a list of directories shouldn't be that hard, the step which demands more of your time involves keyword research in direct relation to your page content, marketing strategy and expected the conversions. There's nothing worse than going to battle and instead of a gun you are carrying a banana, even if you are able to shoot it is not going to do you any good, that might not be the best analogy to illustrate the point which is that you will not be able to rank well in the search engines if you don't have a clear list of keywords for which to optimize your content and anchor texts. Take some time to learn how to use tools such as Wordtracker and Worze and you will be ahead of thousands of competitors within your niche. Number of Quality Links Once you have a decent list of directories it is time to schedule your submissions, try to divide this list into small chunks of 40 to 50 sites to which it will submit your links on a daily basis until you run out of directories to submit to, try to vary the anchor texts as much as possible, this will provide a more natural look as it seems that you are acquiring a stable amount of quality inbound links with different keywords instead of getting 1000 and one day with just one anchor text. Strong Home Page Targeting Last but not least, most of the directories will allow you to reference your homepage, it is very rare to find only resources which will allow you to deep link your pages. Since most of the directories are going to cast a vote directed to your homepage it would be a very good idea to determine a set of core keywords which are very hard to rank for but that you hope to eventually dominate. Aiming these core terms at your homepage will give you the ability of creating long tail keywords which can be used to link to internal pages through other methods such as article submissions, social bookmarks, etc.
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