Advanced Marketing Techniques

Submitting your site to both popular and what may seem to be unknown directories is probably one of the most overlooked strategies by the average Internet marketer.

Hard-core SEO consultants know the true power of directories and some have turned directory submission into their primary business because of this.

The strategy is widely talked about in the SEO community but for the average internet marketer, they overlook the opportunity because they don’t see the immediate results that they can see with pay per click.

The trade off is simple. With pay per click marketing you get immediate and guaranteed traffic. With SEO you get long term results with no guarantees whatsoever. In fact, any SEO consultant that guarantees you placements is either lying or tricking you. You can’t guarantee what you can’t control, so unless you own Yahoo or Google, or you’re paying them for placement (which they only offer in Pay Per Click ad placements) then any guarantee is simply a hope for the best. Pay Per Click marketing gets more expensive every day, and natural results are free.

People spend a great deal of money hiring SEO Consultants and submitting their sites to directories because they want free traffic coming to their site. Sometimes the free traffic completely replaces Pay Per Click marketing and other times people just use the free traffic to help supplement the pay per click marketing expenses.

However let’s get back on topic here. Directory submission is one of the most powerful techniques in the SEO consultant’s corner. By hand submitting to directories, you get listed by directories that are run by real people. The search engines such as Google and Yahoo know that these directories hand approve people, and because of this, the major search engines consider links from directories to be “authority” links.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, and all of the search engines that send out “spiders” or “robots” (programs) to index your site give you a more prominent placement if you are linked to from directories. Obviously some directories are more powerful than others. Yahoo’s directory is so powerful it cost $299 a year to even be considered for inclusion.

The “Open Directory Project” is a non-profit, so if you get in, (which can be a daunting task) you can do so for free. Inclusion in this directory will not only get you listed in Google’s directory but it will get you listed in potentially hundreds of other directories that use the Open Directories free information.

There are dozens of other high quality directories that accept submissions at a fraction of the price that Yahoo charges. While they don’t have the same traffic that Yahoo Directory has, the good ones do get indexed by the major search engines, and those search engines see each and every one of those links in the directories as authority links.

It is possible to develop dozens of high quality non-reciprocal links directed to your site from authority sites such as Search Engine Directories. If they are properly submitted, many times they will have your keywords in the links as well. This makes your “authority” links even more powerful because they are considered “anchor-text” links. Anchor Text links are links that have the keyword phrases that people would search on in order to find your site right in the hyperlink itself.

One of the best reasons why Directory Submission is so powerful is the fact that most directories that charge a submission fee only charge it once. So it’s very likely that 10 years from now you can still reap the benefits of being listed in that directory.

For the last few years, links have been absolutely vital to good placement in the search engines. This is primarily because Google places the incoming links as one of the most important factors for determining relevancy. However, most linking methods have been neutralized by Google once they determine that the links are not natural.

Some people have spent thousands of dollars developing links through link exchanges, link farms, and so forth, only to have their site and everybody that linked to them disappear from Google. This doesn’t happen to sites simply linked to from the Search Engine Directories that value their listings and their ability to help their client listings.

So as I have said before… what was old is now new again. The old fashioned 11 year old method of submitting your site to all the major (and minor) directories is once again the best and most secure way to get the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to take notice.

Good placements in a dozen search engine directories such as Gimpsy, JoeAnt, Tygo, and SevenSeek can go a long way towards helping your rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Lycos. In fact, your site will rank higher if you never submit to Google, Yahoo or MSN and simply let them find your site through the directories to begin with. The process takes time, but as I mentioned before, the trade off is simple.

SmartSubmit is unlike most submission services. Xeal provides pre-submission consulting and hand-submits to each of the top directories. With pre-submission consulting you are more likely to receive the type of listing you want and the type of listing that benefits you most with the search engine spiders.

For more information about SmartSubmit, please visit:
http://www.Xeal.com/smartsubmit.htm