The SEO Directory Submission Guide

Manual Directory Submission is now becoming the trend in starting any Internet marketing campaign. In the offline world a new business would list their information in trade journals, yellow pages, phone directories and any other medium they could list in. It is much the same for Internet marketing except it is much easier and less expensive to accomplish the same task.

What you are effectively doing by submitting your site to a directory is telling the world that you are open for business. The search engines crawl the directories often looking for new meat to sink their spiders teeth in. Listing in directories is the fast approach to getting your website crawled and then indexed in a natural fashion.

Being indexed naturally is preferable because you won’t trip any search engine alarms. The end benefit is that you will get spidered and indexed at no cost (if you list in the free directories). Another benefit that I have noticed is that Google AdSense tends to pay more per click when I am found naturally as opposed to force feeding my site to the spiders.

In Google’s massive attempt to fight click fraud they have implemented complex algorithms to detect the possibility of click fraud before it starts. On December 2, 2004 Google’s CFO, George Reyes said “I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model”. (see click fraud CNN Report)

Google has had plenty of time to initiate click fraud algorithms and is continuing to enhance them all the time. They must protect the integrity of the click-through to their clients’ web sites. One method of doing this is spotting aggressive strategies to gain indexing and penalizing sites by paying lower click rates. Though Google has not admitted to this strategy, you may run your own tests, as I have, and it is pretty easy to figure out.

The force feeding methods like blog and ping do still work. I have a few web sites that make some good AdSense revenue from blog and ping jobs but sometimes I try to re-create that success using the same strategy and I get less than optimal results. I believe that Google’s algorithm is still missing some aggressive techniques, sometimes. I, for one, would rather start using search engine friendly methods now because it is just a matter of time before all aggressive techniques are caught and rendered useless.

Blogger and Wordpress are savvy to the game or else they wouldn’t have implemented their strict captcha systems. Both systems are getting more aggressive all the time in their fight against mass blog and ping strategies. The search engines don’t like it and what they don’t like will eventually die. Look at it this way… If it can die, it will.

The only method that can’t die is playing by the search engine rules. Get indexed naturally and you will reap the reward in the end.

Sure doing things right is time consuming, but so is doing things wrong. Sure you can make money doing things wrong, but I promise you, the strategy will lose its effectiveness over time. Why not concentrate on the plan (The Plan - backlink) that I have set in front of you? It takes the same amount of time and effort and you will make more money in the end.

The most time consuming part of my entire strategy is submitting your web sites to the directories. The goal of this report is to show you how and where to submit your web sites. Once you know how to do it yourself, you will see the value in outsourcing this task the moment you can afford to.

Submitting your site to directories

From the homepage of a directory take your time and find the appropriate category your site fits into. You can do a keyword search using your most important keywords or key phrases and note the category that lists these sites. That will probably be the best category for your site. You may also have multiple categories, in which case you must submit under all the suitable categories.

Once you have found a suitable category, look out for a “Suggest a site” or an “Add URL” link. Click on this link to submit your site.

Since Directories do not use robots, your best bet is to describe your site accurately as the final decision of adding your web site to a directory’s database rests with the editor who reviews your web site.

Good site design, fast loading pages, and informative content are very important issues. Stick with the plan and you will be fine.

From the homepage of a directory take your time and find the appropriate category your site fits into. You can do a keyword search using your most important keywords or key phrases and note the category that lists these sites. That will probably be the best category for your site. You may also have multiple categories, in which case you must submit under all the suitable categories.

Once you have found a suitable category, look out for a "Suggest a site" or an "Add URL" link. Click on this link to submit your site.

Since Directories do not use robots, your best bet is to describe your site accurately as the final decision of adding your web site to a directory's database rests with the editor who reviews your web site.

Open a text editor and start a new file. Call it directory_submissions.txt or any other name that you can quickly reference. Add the URL of you home page and be sure to include the http:// (for pasting later).

You will need to create several descriptions of your site of varying character length. Most directories have a limit on the number of characters you can use in your description. The common character limits are 100, 150, 200, 250, 500.

Create a list of as many keywords as you can think of by order of importance underneath the descriptions in your text file.

You will want to create a throw away email account. Many of the directories will not allow well known free accounts like yahoo, hotmail or gmail. It is best to have an email address that matches the domain you are submitting. Many directories will not allow your submission if the email address does not match the domain.

You can save a ton of time by having a file ready for copying and pasting to the directories.

You can read more about preparing your site for directory submissions at vilesilencer.com

Once you have your text file ready to go then it is time to start submitting. Visit this SEO Friendly Directory List for a listing of free search engine friendly directories that you can start posting your website to.

Just follow the web site optimization design strategy covered in “The SEO Plan” and you will be fine.

Make sure that the directory you submit to is already indexed in the major search engines. The SEO Friendly URL List I provide has already been checked. There are probably over a million web directories out there. Just be sure than any other ones you come across are indexed or else you will be wasting your time submitting your site.

Things To Remember When Doing Manual Directory Submission:

1. Your site’s meta such as title, keyword and description must be all set.

2. Your site’s should not contain any incomplete pages or under construction if you submit this site without this consideration, it will get you rejected fast and guaranteed.

3. Think about your site’s niche products/services and concentrate on them building your pages very carefully to “zero-in” those products/services.

4. Make sure that products and services are very similar to your site’s meta keywords. It’s better to have 5 zeroed-in keywords rather than having 20 or 25 keyword. Concentrate on those 5 keywords. Eat, sleep, breath, and do every day things with those “keywords” in mind, don’t let anything in the world distract you from those goals.

5. Your site’s meta descriptions are also derived and suggested from your keywords. An example construction is covered in detail in the article titled “Web Site Optimization“.

6. Your site’s meta title will need to agree and be similar with your keywords and description combined.

Manual Vs. Outsourcing Directory Submissions

When you are just starting out you will need to do your directory submissions manually by yourself. The idea is to take the money you make from your first set of web sites and re-invest that money into having a professional company or individual do the directory submission work for you.

Is it cost effective to build a site and then spend a week submitting to 500 directories? Or is it more cost effective to build a site then outsource the directory submission work and then build another 5 page site?

When you consider that one site will yield you $10 - $15 a day (according to the plan) once it is indexed and you have your ads placed, then spending some money to have the directory work outsourced is a wise investment.

We offer professional directory submission services but we are not the cheapest solution. We are not cheap because we actually do it right. You can easily hire other companies to do this work for you at $17 - $20 for 150 directory submissions but I promise you that they are not doing it right.

Consider this:

It will take an average of 2 minutes to submit to each directory. Multiply that by 150 directories and it will take 5 hours to submit your site. There is no legitimate company out there that will do this kind of manual labor for you for what works out to only $4 an hour ($20 bucks for true manual submissions… give me a break!)

In the manual directory submission business, you get what you pay for every time.

For more details and pricing for having us do your directory submissions simply follow this link (directory submission service)

A professional Directory Editor will personally hand submit your website to the directories. In accordance with Google's Website Quality Guidelines, we will not do all of your submissions in one day. Your submissions will be spaced out over time to display natural backlink growth to the search engines.

Conclusion

The best method to get your new website indexed naturally is through submitting your website to some good directories. As stated above, you should be mindful of which directories you submit your website to.

Directory submissions should only be done one time to several hundred, search engine friendly, directories. After your site has been listed with the directories, do not pursue this method of gaining links anymore.