Webmasters often complain these days that directories submission is not as powerful as it used to be. Whether this is true or not is a subject for a separate discussion. The purpose of this post is to highlight common mistakes made by SEOs and webmasters when submitting to web directories. These guidelines should help you to avoid the mistakes and maximise effect of directory submission on your site rankings. 1. Do not waste your time by submitting to as many directories as possible. Rather, give preference to high-quality directories, which have lots of backlinks and rank well on their targeted keywords. Here you can download a list of quality High-PR directories. 2. Submit primarily to topically-related categories. Select a relevant category for submission, ideally such that perfectly matches the topic of your website. Submitting to Misc. or Other categories is usually of little benefit. 3. Submit approximately 15-20% of your links to deep link directories. Those are special directories that allow you to link to internal pages of your website. 4. Do not submit to a few hundreds or thousands of directories in one go. Even though a safe submission rate strongly depends on the preceding pattern of your link building, be very careful, as a sudden spike in the number of backlinks may trigger a Google filter lowering your website ranking or even leading to ban. 5. Submit links with thoughtfully targeted keywords in the anchor text, making sure that those are highly relevant to the content of your webpage you are submitting. 6. Vary the title/anchor text by employing synonyms and various combinations of the main keywords with other words. Use a keyword suggestion tool to find those. 7. Vary site's description. Make a unique description for every directory you submit to. There are free programs that allow you to create thousands of variants semi-automatically. 8. Do not submit to web directories with redirect. 9. Do not submit to directories with nofollow attribute. Both 8 and 9 are of very little worth unless they drive direct traffic to your site. The latter, though, is the case for very few high-traffic directories only. 10. Do not submit to dynamic link pages. Some web directories do not reserve a constant place for your link, but instead offer you a position that constantly varies depending on the directory's internal factors such as user voting, paid positioning, recently added links etc. This sort of links is of little value; use them only as your last resort. If you follow the above suggestions, you may soon discover that directory submission can be quite a powerful tool in your overall link-building campaign. Good luck! P.S. Any other suggestions on how to maximise the effect of directories submission and, of course, comments are highly welcome! This post is a short summary of more extended article published here: Common mistakes about directories submission