Directories

I have been reading about directories and how to submit your website to them. Submitting to directories is used to increase the links you have coming into your website.

There are several different ways of submitting to directories. The first is paid inclusion - you pay to have your website listed with a certain directory. They will list your site usually within a couple of days and the link will stay in their directory for a certain amount of time.

Another way to submit to directories is by using a link exchange inclusion - they will list you in their directory once they see a link to their directory site posted on your website. It can take a couple of weeks to get your site listed with them, and when they check in the future and see that you have removed their link from your website, they will also remove yours from theirs.

The last way is to have your link listed for free in a directory. They encourage an exchanged link, but it is not required. It can take months for them to add your website to their listing. It is usually the lower PR (pagerank) or newer directories that offer this. They can be good, but it is hard to gain exposure for your site if they are too new and not yet known themselves.

It is wise to check some of the other listings already in the directory to see what kind of website content they are listing. There is a lot of negative content on the internet that you do not want your website associated with - it hurts your business and your popularity with the search engines. It can even get you banned from the search engines.

Information about your website needs to be on hand when submitting to directories - they are all different and they require different info when submitting. Automation is not an option - most have the coded letters that need to hand keyed.

This is a very time consuming part of owning a website and I can understand why most people hire SEO companies to do this kind of legwork. This back-end work takes away from the time spent on photographing and processing images. But once it gets done, you only need to do updates every few months for the new directories you may want to be listed in.