subject: Search Engine Directories - Building Links To Your Site [print this page] Before Google arrived, Lycos and Yahoo had search engine directories. Their home page would just have a whole lot of different listings of different categories. You'd click and say, right, I'm interested in health and you'd click that.
Before Google arrived, Lycos and Yahoo had search engine directories. Their home page would just have a whole lot of different listings of different categories. You'd click and say, right, I'm interested in health and you'd click that.
I'm interested in physio and you'd click that and you'd drill deeper into the site. Then it would just have a list of businesses and websites and things like that. That's what a directory is.
Those directories, once Google came around, pretty much went the way of the dodo. They're not really that useful for us as searchers because we just type into Google what it is that we want to have found or what it is that we want to find. But these search engine directories still exist and they represent a good linking opportunity for you to make sure that we build links back to the website.
So one of the first things that I do is when I work with a client, I'll submit to about three hundred directories. We use a service called Directory Maximizer. By the way, we have come up with a Directory Maximizer review which could be helpful for you. You pay about 16c per submission. So it's quite a cheap service. The benefit of building these back links using this directory method is we're going to build a whole lot of back links to the website with the URL as the anchor text.
When you build links back to the website, we want to make sure that we build it naturally, and some people will link to our website with urls, some people will link with specific words that we're trying to rank for and some people will link with click here. By using the directories online, there are a whole lot of different websites such as DMOZ.
This is one of the more well-known directories and I don't think Directory Maximizer submits to this one because there is a bit more of a manual process required. There are the main top tier categories and then you can just keep drilling deeper and deeper into the site before we're given a list of websites.
There are a whole host of directories like that across the internet that we can build links back to our website. This particular DMOZ is linking back to the websites with the name of the company. A lot of the other directories will just be linking to the URL of your website. So I use the directories for our SEO services site for one you'll be linking back just to your home page with the URL. You're not going to get as much, it's not an authority. These are lower quality links and the reason we do it is because we want to make it look natural. So we're building links from a good variety of sources.
These three hundred sites of search engine directories, they're really set up for exactly what I'm talking about, as opposed to expecting any punter to just simply go to that directory site and look for something. If you visit them they look human friendly but they don't do very well in the search engines. The chances of someone going there and using it are slim to none.
