Submitting Your Site to Directories

I’ve been working on SEO this past week. The Pet Wiki is a pretty new site, and needs a lot of work to increase the page rank so that it will show up higher in search engine results. One of the best ways to do that is to have others link to the site. Search engines figure, if other people trust you enough to give you a link, shouldn’t they? I spent a lot of last week submitting The Pet Wiki to online directories. It’s not the most fun job in the world, but it’s a necessary part of the process to get your site recognized. Here are some tips that I’ve learned along the way:

• Finding directories – There are so many directories out there, it’s hard to know where to start. Get a list and stick to it. A friend of mine showed me a tool that helped me keep things in order. The best list that I have found so far for submitting sites to free directories is SubmitHelper.com. They have a tool that you can use to go through all the directory sites and submit your link. If you don’t want to use the tool you can browse over to the list that they have compiled (with links) and go through them one at a time.
• DMOZ 1st – The best directory out there is DMOZ or The Open Directory Project. This is the place to be. Whatever directory list that you are using, if it doesn’t include DMOZ, something is wrong. DMOZ has everything you can imagine. I had a problem figuring out where to place The Pet Wiki becase you can’t submit sites to the Pets category. I opened an account and asked a question on the forum. They got back to me within an hour with the answer. ODP is a community of people that really care about what they are doing. They want to get it right and are happy to set you in the right direction.
• Describe your site – You are going to be asked this over and over again. Make sure that you have a description that fits your site. Try to make it to 200 characters. Some sites allow 350, 500 or unlimited number of characters, but most limit you to 200-250 characters. Keep it on your clipboard and paste it in as needed.
• Do a little digging – I have a pet site – how do YOU classify pets? I’ve found the pet category under science, entertainment, society, shopping, home and garden and recreation. I like it best when I find the Pets category under the Family category. It gives me a nice warm and fuzzy feeling to think of my kitties as part of the family. Each directory categorizes their topics differently. Search around for the one that suits your site the most.
• To Pay or Not to Pay – Most of the directory submission forms have multiple options, including pay, reciprocal list and free submissions. Why pay? Because directory owners will review your submission sooner and place your link higher up in the directory. By paying, you will get you site submitted from anywhere from 2 hours to 2 weeks. Don’t pay, and you could wait indefinitely to get your site reviewed. There are hundreds if not thousands of directories out there. If you pay for all of them all, you could go broke. Be selective. Choose the directories with the highest page rank and/or the highest Alexa ranking. Pay for those. Submit all others for free. As far as reciprocal links are concerned, I all the external links on my site are “nofollow” and useless to the directories, so I don’t do it, but feel free to try.
• Be patient – You spent all that time submitting links to directories. Now what? It takes time for the links to get posted and even more time for search engines to recognize them. It might take a couple of months to reap the rewards. Hang in there.

One last thing – I suggest putting on music you love while you do the submissions. It can get a bit mind numbing after a while. Music just makes you happier and makes the time go by faster. Turn it into something fun.

I’d love to hear your take on directory submissions. Have your experiences been the same / different?