The common refrain in webmaster circles is that directories are dead and are not worth submitting to any more. But directories do offer a number of benefits and so should be considered an essential part of the marketing mix for any serious website. Some of the benefits they offer are: co-citation, anchor text, targeted traffic, and deep links.

So why do webmasters commonly believe directories are dead? This is because they make a number of mistakes in submitting to directories that end up costing them many of the benefits they could get. These costly mistakes are:

(1) Costly Mistake #1 - Submitting to 300+ free directories. This will probably do nothing to help your website’s rankings and may even hurt it. In Google, a few quality links will outweigh the benefits of many spammy links. I’ve put together a list of directories ranked by SEOmoz’s page strength tool which gives a good starting point for determining what the best directories
are.

(2) Costly Mistake #2 - Worrying about price rather than value. A common question I hear asked is: “which directories can I submit to for under $20?� However, the Google algorithm relies heavily on the authority of the websites linking to you. Using this logic, you would never submit to Yahoo! directory, which is probably the easiest way to get an authority link to your website. You will get the most value out of directory submissions by submitting to the best ones, rather than the cheapest ones.

(3) Costly Mistake #3 - Believing that directories don’t pack much link juice. This is false. The fact is that there are many directories out there with a tremendous quality and quantity of backlinks. I’ve compiled a list of directories ranked by number of backlinks. As you can see, many directories have more than half a million backlinks and quite a few more have more than a quarter of a million backlinks.

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Webmaster, Web Directories, Article