Hello, I am in a while in SEO now and I am thinking to start a webdirectory site, but I am not aware yet how it works to gain backlinks. Getting backlinks for a particular site is much easier than a webdirectory I guess since a webdirectory cannot get relevant links easily for inner directory pages. I will give an example: my site webdirectorygermany.com, divided with several niches Auto, restaurants, computers, dating, clubs, accounting, lawyers etc. and every niche is divided within cities of Germany. How should I be able to get relevant links for the niche page "restaurants in Berlin" for example? I think I cannot place a link like www.webdirectorygermany.com/restaurants/berlin in a webdirectory of Berlin, right? I have searched a lot but cannot find a similar issue and perhaps I am lacking in SEO knowledge. I have read once that building backlinks for a site the homepage will increase in serps and it will increase the other pages of the site too, but I'm doubting about that now. Thanks for the help and rep will be given.
Other web directories are usually generous in giving you a link back to your main page. There are some deep link directories out there that will give you links to your internal pages. In addition, if you build a quality list sometimes you can get other webmasters to give you a link to your internal pages. But you will have to have good content in your directory to get the link back.
Hmm... You can send out press releases and let the world know about your new site. Backlinks should flourish from there.
I'll give you the ulitmate secret to proper backlink building with web directories and how 99.9% of them fail. You need to require your free submissions to link back to your website, however they should link to the catagory they are submitted in and not the homepage. Not only does this properly spread out your links you'll also get Pagerank value to your catagory web pages which makes selling links much easier.
Very good point S.sandecki that is something i think a lot of people fall down on, most just link straight back to their home page.
Try commenting on dofollow blogs - its amazingly easy and can net you some high pagerank backlinks. It's what I use for most of my link building efforts.
Thank you for all the useful information. But how can I increase the serps of the inner pages? For example Directory site >> category page >> featured advertiser page, now that the featured advertiser page is an inner page of the directory, is there any way to increase that page in the serps? I assume ON-page SEO will be not enough since it needs backlinks to that specific page, right?
I guess my previous question is a bit hard to determine. I hope ssandecki can give some feedback in this question
If your directory is SEO friendly (don't do the nofollow thing) and you allow free submissions your directory will be more attractive. For my directory it really helped to get onto vilesilencer's list of SEO friendly directories, but it's been a while since I checked up on that. You can also do a google search for forums that **allow you** to announce your directory - then follow their rules and be a good participant.