Hi Every One, I have started submitting free directories for our site for last one month is the their any harm to submitting free directories. Please advice me, if you have any Idea. Thanks and Regards Zakir
You should always be selective when it comes to exchanging links. Just because it's free should not be the determining factor. Carefully consider who links to that site, the quality of the site, it's page rank and link popularity. Do they offer direct or indirect links? Are there keywords in the page titles? Upon your review do you personally feel that it is a good site and others will feel the same way? Also, while submitting your links, make sure you vary keyword titles and linking titles. Using the same ones over and over can be very detrimental. Of course this just skims the surface, but all the best in your ventures. Thank you, Sean
Those are some good points, Virginia. I would add to look for nofollow links to make sure you are not giving them a one-way link by nullifying their link to you. You also don't want to do too much reciprocal linking as you can get penalized for this. Often it's good to pay for some directory listings in quality directories and get the one-way link.
I have to admit I am rather new to this game. I have a couple of very new sites and really want to work on the SEO and get some decent ranking and although I understand this takes time, patience is not my strong point... LOL. How do you get penalized for reciprocal links? That is mostly what I see. Why vary keywords and linking titles and how? I am learing as I go along so please feel free to depart as much knowledge as possible. I am a sponge... Thnx D.
Most of the links from free directories do not do any good on Google. However, you get lots of links from all over using the most wanted link texts. so theyre helpful for other search engines like Yahoo and MSN.
Try entering some keywords in this tool http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/. You will see many statistics on variations of the keyword so you can pick out some good ones to focus on. If you want quick results, I would go for keywords that aren't too competitive so that it's easier to rank for them. Varying the anchor text in your backlinks means you are using different keywords that represent the theme of your site in different backlinks. So, I might have 'engagement rings' on one site and 'diamond rings' on another site. It is unnatural to have all your backlinks saying the same thing unless it's your company name and no one is blogging about you. For reciprocal links, I would just keep it to one page of theme-related link exchanges of no more than 30 links to be safe or maybe up to 50, hard to tell. The search engines don't like when you do excessive reciprocal linking because they think you are doing this to artificially inflate your rankings which is considered search engine spamming and it is normally unnatural to have thousands of reciprocal links.
Ok, that makes sense. What is the best way to get one way links since that is the best kind to have? Does posting on forums and blogs using your link in your sig count as links as well?
You can pay for some on directories or buy some through text-link-ads or linkworth. Another good source is to find a good linkbuilder through getafreelancer.com or guru.com or elance.com. Here is my affiliate link if you want to try text-link-ads: http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=30245
hm.. free directories will also do good if the page where your links will be is search engine indexed.