Everyone seems to be looking to make their first million online with pay per click advertising these days. That is because the big players in the industry are promoting PPC heavily. But while the world is looking at PPC, some marketers are quietly making money using old but effective traffic generation methods.
Remember well established like DMOZ, Ezilon, Yahoo Web Directory, etc.? Many marketers have already forgotten about these directories. With all that hype going on about PPC, this is understandable.
But bear in mind that a portion of PCC traffic comes from the search engines. And when you are submitting your sites to web directories, what are you hoping to attain? That's right, you are hoping to get higher rankings in the search engines. Does it work? Time and again, web directory submissions have been proven to be highly effective in SEO. Why is that so?
1) Links are highly relevant.
The links are well organized in their appropriate categories, so you never find irrelevant links next to yours. If you submit a gardening link to the gardening category, you can be sure that only gardening URLs appear next to yours.
2) Static text links.
Web directories list static text links - these are links that search engines love to crawl. You can even submit deep links (links to internal web pages) if you like. Use your target keyword phrase in the anchor texts (very important!).
3) Well aged websites.
Many web directories have been around for ages, and they are well indexed by the search engines. If the web directory has a high page rank, that means the search engines think highly of the website. With inbound links coming from well established websites, your sites have a much better chance of ranking well in the search engines.
When you submit your URL to web directories, you are acquiring permanent links. Permanent links are links that will remain on the website during the lifetime of the website. You don't have to pay any fees to keep your links there.
Some web directories may require you to pay a small fee for a permanent listing. Others will require you to pay a monthly fee. Of course, the web directory must be really popular to be able to command such fees. In return, you get a featured listing, which means that your links will be ranked above other non-featured links in the web directory.
If you have the budget, you can purchase such listings. But only buy featured listings from high page rank directories. Otherwise, you can always stick to the free web directories. There are so many free directories out there that you probably won't be able to submit to all. To save time, outsource the web directory submission to an SEO service provider. They will help you do all the work.
