Directory Submission and SEO

A lot of people ask me to submit their site to directories as part of their SEO campaign. That's fine I say, which ones do you want me to submit to? That's when the phone goes a little quiet. Er just submit it to the best ones for me please. That's easy for my clients to say, but with over 20,000 free directories and over 1000 paid directories how do I quantify who is the best?

The first step in deciding if a directory is worth submitting to is to find out if it is listed in Google? Directories that are not listed in Google are not worth submitting to. The way to check if the directory you are considering submitting to is listed, is to go to Google search and type in this. site: followed by the URL. For example site:http://www.site-sift.com. This will tell you if the site is listed, and how many pages are listed in Google. You can then decide for yourself whether you think it is worth submitting to or not.

Another good way to determine the importance of a directory is the page rank it has. PageRank is a function of Google that measures the quality of a website on a scale of 0 to10. One being not so good, and 10 being the best. The site in the above example site sift, has a page rank of 6. That would be a better than average site according to Google, and would be worth submitting your site to.

Another thing for you consider would be free submissions against paid submissions. Free submission directories will generally not be of great benefit to your SEO campaign, unless they have a high page rank. But directories with high page rank generally charge for submissions. My advice for stating off would be submit your site to 10 paid directories and 100 free directories. Try to pick directories with good PageRank (for free and paid listings), as they are well respected by Google and will generally get more visitors than low pr directories.

Whichever directories you decide to submit to, always make sure you write a good title and description for your listing. Poorly written titles and descriptions will result in your site not being accepted into the directory, and if it does get accepted, a poorly written title and description may put people off visiting your site.