Get the Most Out of Web Directories and Article Directories

There are ways around promoting your site. And it isn’t even going to cost you a cent (only a bit of your time). There are what we call web directories and article directories. Web directories, simply, are directories of various categories containing website listings. On the other hand, article directories are directories also containing various categories where you can publish your articles. Why mention the two? You’ll soon find out.

First off, are web directories. Did you know that there hundreds of web directories exist all across the net? What you do is you submit your site to these directories, and there you go – instant links to your site! Did you also know that most of those web directories are free? That’s right, they won’t charge you anything (maybe just some occasional link backs to their site – “reciprocal linking”). What matters is that a site is linking back to your site. If you do this with hundreds of other web directories (thousands, if you have the time and perseverance), you would have that many sites linking back to you. By doing so, your link popularity will increase. Link popularity is the number of links pointing back to your site (the more links, and the higher their PR, the better). It also the basis on how search engines would rank your site. If a search engine sees that you have high link popularity, they would see your site to be important, and rank you accordingly.

Next are article directories. I know what you’re thinking. How would articles help your site get traffic? First reason – by submitting to article directories, you will have the chance to promote your site through the resource box or author’s biography. Like web directories, several hundred article directories exist. And again, they are also free. What you want are directories that let you submit and use their other articles for free. Why use free articles? Second reason – if your site is lacking content and you want people to regularly visit you, use these free articles as your web content (always include the author and source). With your site having more content, more traffic will eventually come to you.

These are two ways of boosting your link popularity, page rank, and of course, traffic. Other than these, you can try getting inbound links through forum participation and link partnership with sites that are related to yours (but that’s another story). I hope you would find this useful, so enlist to web directories and write your articles now.

Search Engine Ranking

Everyone knows that top ranked sites get a lot of traffic, BUT is that because they are “top ranked” or is it because they get a lot of traffic that makes them top ranked?

Which comes first the Chicken or the Egg?

The eternal question, here’s a way to answer it, in relation to Search Engines anyway

First, the major Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, all have different formulas for calculating how they rank a site and these formulas are always changing so it’s impossible to know exactly how to optimize a site for top ranking all the time.

One thing is fairly certain though and it doesn’t matter if this changes or not because the means of achieving a top rank will on its own, provide more traffic than we would get from a top ranking position anyway! I’m talking about INCOMING LINKS.

I’ve seen Log reports from a site ranked consistently in the top 5 positions on all major search engines, which show that less then 20% of all traffic is coming from the search engines, and the rest is coming from incoming and reciprocal links.

To learn more about incoming and reciprocal links go here

Incoming links are links from other sites and pages that send people to our site.
Reciprocal links; are links from our site to someone else’s and a link from them back to our site.

Having a large numbers of reciprocal and incoming links is good because while giving us more traffic it also makes us rank highly in search engines. As explained above it doesn’t matter if we don’t rank so well in the search engines, because we have more traffic from the incoming and reciprocal links anyway. So more traffic better rank, better rank more traffic, it’s perpetual motion!
If you would like to see how Alexa determines ranking here’s a quote from their site.

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).”

(Taken from: http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html )