Three Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories
It is common knowledge among webmasters that web directory submissions are of great help for search engine optimization, the fact that you can get several of these listings allows your site to be exposed to more people who visit the directory and the search engine crawlers which visit them as well. An added benefit of directory submissions is the link equity which comes from sites with good reputation, a vote from one of these trusted sites will often count a lot more than links from similar sites.
Today's web directories tend to be quite diverse in terms of categorization, traffic and trust. Some directories will offer several categories which may apply to your site, however its is important to see what type of content distribution they are applying to the resource, some will allow their indexes to be spammed simply because the directory is ran by one person who doesn't have the time to review and edit all categories and certain sites do have periodical reviews in order to keep all the content properly organized.
As you may know some web directories sell links, others list them for free, some include reviews and extra content on each sub category and others are simply there to collect revenues from ad space sales. In order to decide which are the best directories to submit your sites to, you need to pay attention to all of these aspects.
Web directories which are exclusively dedicated to sell links might not be a good place to list your site if the listings are unfiltered, irrelevant and somewhat spammy, for instance if you visit the "business section" which is known to be a popular category for spammers to exploit, you can take a good look at the type of sites they are listing and linking to, if you see credit card sites listed next to car loans and debt consolidation sites without a proper sub-category tree this might not be the place you want your site to be listed on, this is because directories which let their indexes be constantly spammed will end up loosing trust with the search engines and their votes will count less and less, some of these sites have even turned into link farms due to the lack of editorial reviews.
Yet another factor you must pay attention to is the "ad to content ratio", this means that if the directory lists many ads on each subcategory your link may not be able to attract visitors because images and flashing animations will obviously grab visitor's attention a lot more; the page rank is quite important, however some may not pass the desired link equity because they use link parameters which block your site from getting the page rank benefit, such parameter is the rel="no-follow" html tag which tells the search engine spiders not to rate your site based on the listing you might be getting from the directory.
You should take in consideration all of these factors and also rely on tools which let us see the link strength a directory has, for instance directories which count with .gov and .edu back links are more likely to provide better link equity than sites which rely solely on .com top level domains (TLD) for their rankings.
A great list of established directories are: the dmoz.org open source project, another highly recommended source for those site owners who can afford the link price is the Yahoo business directory which was established back in 1995 and counts with over 2000+ .gov TLD which link to it, yet another great directory to take a look at is the business.com directory which counts with great page rank and can provide much benefit for your sites. As you can see the listings on these directories are paid, however the human editors which are in charge of keeping the quality of the listings on each category are quite strict, in other words spammy sites will not be listed.
In addition, web directories such as Quango.com, goguides.com, Joeant.com, 123world.com follow great quality and review guidelines, there are several other web directories which deserve be listed how ever you must always use your better judgment, knowledge and common sense in order to decide whether or not a site is worth submitting to. Remember that the time you spend submitting to directories represents your opportunity cost, so invest it well and make it count.
One of the best directory submission services for helping your website is Nationsubmit Effective Manual Directory Submission Not only will they help grow the popularity of your site, but they will set it up for long term success in the future by establishing a trusted network of links from which the website will grow. View some of their link building Packages. You can also check out their Link Building Blog.
