Most webmasters agree that having a lot of links to your website is the key to rank well in the search engines. Quality links become very important when you are trying to rank higher than all your competitors for your chosen keywords. One of the best ways to achieve an optimum level of links to your site (back links) is to submit your webpage to directories. This article will focus on submitting to free directories and the techniques you can use to help you improve your search engine ranking with SEO.

Why submit to directories
Submitting your site to directories will not cause a flood of visitors (you might get ten or twenty a month) so it is important to know why it is worth doing at all. Submitting to directories will give you a back link. Back links are an important part of all the major search engines algorithms (the way they rank websites). This simply means that sites with quality back links will rank higher in the search engine rankings. These back links can also increase the amount of times your website is indexed (listed and updated) in the search engines meaning your latest content will be listed much faster. Using your keywords in the anchor tag can increase your ranking for specific keywords (more on this below). Back links from directory submission can also help to increase your pagerank, which is another complex Google algorithm to determine your websites relevance or importance.

Choosing directories
There are literally thousands of directories on the Internet ranging from very specific topic directories to the very broad directories where almost all sites are welcome. Start with topical (niche) directories that are relevant to the topic/s of your website. For example if you have a finance blog then try to submit it to as many finance directories as possible. This will ensure quality links from a site that is relevant. Once you have submitted to all the relevant directories you can find then start submitting to the many broad web directories. Webmaster forums are a great place to find good free directories.

Being accepted
As most directory submissions are hand checked (by a real person) it pays to make sure your site meets all the criteria before trying to submit it. All directories have a set of specific submission guidelines you should try to read first, but if you follow these tips you won’t have too many problems:

· Don’t submit adult, gambling, piracy, online pharmacy and other questionable sites unless it is stated specifically that they are acceptable. There are plenty of specific directories for these markets.
· Don’t submit a site that is under construction or very new with little content.
· Don’t stuff your submission with keywords (more tips on this below)

How to create quality links in directories
The following advice relates to filling out directory submission forms

Category
This can actually be quite difficult, try to choose the best category to fit your website. It should be relevant to your content. If you just can’t choose ask someone else where they think your site belongs.

Title – Consider the anchor text
When you submit your site to a directory you will be asked for a website title, but before you simply write your website name you need to know a couple of things. Anchor text is what Google looks for when reading a link so you need to make sure your anchor text is one of the keywords you are targeting. Most directories use the title they ask you for as the anchor text so instead of writing your exact website title try using one of your keyword terms. For example if you have a website called firetrucks.com that you are trying to rank for the keyword “fire truck photos” then use this term as the title when submitting to directories instead of your website title “fire trucks”.

Although remember you should never use the same anchor tag for every submission as this looks a little like a spamming tactic to the search engines. Try and have a minimum of three keyword terms to use as anchor tags and use the 60/30/10 technique. That is 60% for your main keyword term, 30% for your next major keyword term and 10% for your other term/s.

Description
This is less important than the title and those search engines are still looking around, but if you make sure they are relevant to your website then you will not have any problems. Write your titles to explain what visitors will find when they visit your page and try to make them interesting not just a list of keywords!

Each directory allows different lengths for the description so try to have 3 or 4 different descriptions of varying lengths that you can alternate between. Keep these in a text file for quick copy and pasting.

Tags/Keywords
As long as these are relevant to your website then you will not have a problem. Try to write relevant tags and keywords that people will be searching.

The more thought you put into your title and description, the more powerful your link will be.

Things to avoid when submitting to directories
It is important to know that Google is wary of new pages, if it finds hundreds of new links pointing to your site in a few days you will be penalised because the links do not look natural. The best way to submit to directories is to keep a list and submit to about 2-5 directories each day until you have completed your list.