Guide to Developing an Internet Business

Tips on Submitting Your Internet Business Site to Directories

The Google webmaster guidelines suggest submitting your site to DMOZ, Yahoo and other industry specific directories. Since Google doesn't have too many other very specific guidelines on how best to promote your sites, I think these are most likely important suggestions to follow.

As of this writing, lots of links in general seem to help with rankings in Yahoo and MSN. Google, however, can be a bit more finicky about the kind of links you get. Some webmasters think their sites have been penalized or sandboxed for having too many directory links too fast. As noted in my section on the Google sandbox , Google is looking for a natural distribution of links. So in general that means getting a mix of general directory, industry specific directory, reciprocal and one way links.

Some general tips for directory submissions are:

• Be selective at first as you are building up links for your site. It may be counter productive from a Google standpoint to submit your site to every directory you possibly can. As noted elsewhere in my articles, Google wants to see natural links and "signals of quality" in the sites it lists, and links from 300 spammy directories may not give off a good quality signal.
  
  
• Think twice about paying for some of the directory submission services. Many of the directories they submit to are general directories, and often with a hefty fee to boot. In many cases you may be better off just submitting to your site to relevant, industry specific directories and many of these are free or low cost.
  
  
• If you have a choice between spending your directory dollars on 10 general small time directory listings with a $10 fee each, or one authority directory listing in your industry for $100, I think you would rank better in Google with the one relevant authority listing.
  
  
• For ideas of where to submit your site, check the backlinks for your competitors sites and search for directories within their backlinks. The best place to search for backlinks is to use Yahoo and use the command:
  
  linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorssite.com
  
  This will show you links to any page (not just the home page) of your competitor's site. You can also search in any search engine for terms like: directory keyword, where keyword is the name of your industry or product to find directories specific to your site's topic.
  
  
• Not all directory listings are spiderable or pass page rank. There are many tricks directory owners can use to keep search engine spiders from following links, and it gets time consuming to test for them all. So the best way I've found to check is just to check the backlinks for other entries on the directory page where you want a listing. If the directory in question doesn't show up in the backlinks for any of the other web sites with listings on the page, then there is a good chance that somehow the directory owners have in some way made the made the links not followable by the search engines spiders. Avoid these types of directories unless you are sure the listings themselves will bring your site a lot of traffic.
  
  
• I would avoid directories where they have three way link schemes or you link to their "sponsor" in return for a link in their directory. Many of these directories are one spam report away from getting banned by the search engines, and if that happens you don't want to get caught up in the scheme. Google's webmaster guidelines specifically state not to get involved in any dodgy links schemes, so if you get caught participating in one you risk getting your site penalized or perhaps even dropped from their index.