SEO Web Design

SEO Directory Linking To Achieve Higher Keyword Placement

Manually adding links back to your website from directories can have a very positive impact on your search engine keyword placement. This process builds backlinks and can even allow you to use anchor text keywords. This process can increase page rank and specifically tell search engines which keywords you are trying to promote. With enough backlinks and anchor text links, you can eventually find your site at the top of the search engines.

Backlinks are considered any link that is available publicly on the internet that links back to your website. When you use anchor text as the link, this seems to improve the quality. Anchor text is when a keyword or phrase is actually linked to your page.

Example:

This article is about website optimization and the use of directory linking.

In this example, the term “website optimization” is linked to http://www.topspotwebdesign.com .

This tells google that topspotwebdesign.com is a good site to suggest when someone searches for “website optimization”. Had I just used the url, google would not know which keyword is more important for that page and the link would not be as valuable. The link also becomes more valuable when the page that is linking to it is about the same subject. Since this article is about website optimization, this link becomes more relevant and will have more value than the same link coming from a video game site, or other unrelated topics. A third factor that is considered is the page rank of the page with the referring link. The higher the page rank, the more valuable the link is.

Most directories require a reciprocal link exchange. This means that in order for you to get a link, you must also provide a link to their website. These links are checked on a regular basis to verify that the reciprocal links are still live and you should do the same for the sites where your link appears. This can be done manually for just a few links or you can use software that will automatically check these links for you on a regular basis. The more links, the better, so we obviously recommend using the automated process.

If you are interested in directory linking, you have probably heard of link building software that can do this process automatically. In general, we do not recommend using these programs, because the quality of links are very poor and many of these links can actually hurt your site, because they are considered spam. These automated systems also build a large number of link in a short period of time, which is generally considered bad practice for site SEO.

The best way to build links is by manually entering them in sites that are relevant to your own site’s content. If you have a website about Horses, then find other directories or sites that also talk about horses. This practice will ensure the best possible backlink quality and help you build a positive presence in your online community.