How Many Directory Submissions Do You Need?

By Author: Amy Rich
Total Articles: 10
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How many directory submissions do you need to get the back links that you want?

The answer, of course, is the proverbial "it depends." Back links don't come easy, but directory submissions make it appear so. How many you need to succeed at getting the search engine rankings you want, however, is a question that bears no easy answer. There are generally two approaches to link building through directory submissions.

The Quality Approach: Some people caution against too many directory submissions and say that you should only go for the quality submissions, but quality is difficult to measure. Generally, the quality directories that are mentioned are the ones that everyone knows about - DMOZ, BOTW, Yahoo!, etc. But those are not the only directories that give back links and if you listen to the quality gurus then you'll end up paying $10-$50 for every single directory submission you attempt. Not a smart move, especially if you have a tight budget.

The Quantity Approach: The quantity approach is all about getting as many directory submissions as you can. People who use this approach will go on and on forever ...
... looking for directories to submit their website to and make sure that no directory is left out. That's all well and good, but some discretion is in order because some directories act as nothing but link farms and you could be associating yourself with bad neighborhoods. These bad neighborhoods won't help you any with the search engines. In fact, they may even harm you.

The Hybrid Approach To Directory Submissions: The approach that I prefer is affectionately called The Hybrid Approach. It recognizes that both quantity and quality are important. You want as many GOOD directory submissions as possible. That means you have to rule out certain directories due to reputation. Even by ruling out the bad directories, there are still thousands of general website directories available to the average webmaster and almost all of them provide good back links. There is a virtual gold mine of linking opportunities for the webmaster who is interested in hunting them down.

So how many directory submissions do you need? 100? 1,000? 10,000?

I'd say there is no right answer. You can stop at 100, but that won't be enough for most webmasters to achieve high rankings with backlinks. 1,000 is better, but it's always best to throw in a little diversity in terms of your anchor text and the pages of your site that you link to. In other words, you need to do some deep linking with relevant anchor text appropriate for each page of your website and not just the home page. That's probably the biggest mistake new webmasters make in their directory submissions campaigns.

To be effective, a directory submissions campaign should focus on multiple pages of your website, multiple anchor text phrases for each of your pages, and multiple website directories.

If you target each your key phrases and match those key phrases to the best page on your site that is relevant to that key phrase and submit it to 1,000 directories over a reasonable period of time you'll see a marked difference in your link popularity and in your search rankings. Wait a reasonable period of time and do it again and you'll see more great benefits. The bottom line on directory submissions is it never ends. Not if you want to do it right.

You can read more about benefits of article submission and how it can help you get links for your website.