It is a well known fact that building back links to your website is one of the most important elements of modern search engine optimization (SEO) of a website. a back link is a link from another website to yours.

Acquiring back links is one of the most painstaking jobs you can do online. It takes up a lot of your time. Many online businesses have been built on this aspect of SEO alone.

There are many submission services springing up daily. Whether it is article submission or director submission. There are also link exchange services of all kinds, free and paid. There is even the occasional article exchange program between webmasters. All to the objective of building back links. That is to tell you how important back links are to your effort at ranking well in the search engines. In fact, the number one search engine Google.com's algorithm is built around back links.

Back links are of many types.

So, how do you build back links to your website using directories. Directories are websites that list other websites according to categories and sub categories. Websites are listed under different topics. Some of the most popular directories are the Yahoo, Google and DMOZ directories.

You can build back links using directories in three ways. Through;

1. Free directories
2. Paid directories
3. Reciprocal directories

You can get a comprehensive lists of these directories and their page rank at www.directorycritic.com To build these back links fast your can either use a directory submission software or you give it to a submission service. Hiring a submission service gives you more time to concentrate on other marketing aspect of your website. But if you think you have the time (it is time consuming), you can purchase a good submission software like submiteaze to do your submission your self.

Using free directories to build back links.

Beware, that using this type of directory to build back link may not produce much. The quality of back links you get is not much. Most free directories are new directories. Their goal is to get other websites to list in their directories so that their directories will be filled up fast with content. Once they get to some certain stage, after two or three months when they have acquired some page rank, they start to charge for listing in their directories.

However, you can get a very good free back link, if you get your site listed in the dmoz.org directory. This is a human reviewed general web directory. There are other quality free directories. You may have to wait a long time to get listed. And even when you are listed, the web page where your site is listed may be buried so deep in the site that it is of no value what so ever.

Using reciprocal directories to build back links.

Reciprocal directories are a little better than free directories. Your site submission is more readily accepted because of the reciprocal link you are offering to the directory. So your waiting time for acceptance is shorter than for the free directories. However, just like for the free directories, the webmaster is at liberty to list your site anywhere in the directory. This, most of the time, means being buried so deep in the directory structure that you do not get any value for listing.

Using paid directories.

Using paid directories to build back links is the best way to build quality back links to your site. Before we get into how to build quality back links using this type of directory, lets look at the advantages in being listed in them.

A. Before a directory will even think of charging for listing it must have acquired some quality. Either through page rank, which is the most obvious due to the page rank bar, or through acceptance in the webmaster community. And most of these paid directories are being spidered (crawled) by the search engines regularly. Sometimes on a daily basis. So if you have a new site your chances of being picked up and indexed quickly by the search engines are very high indeed.

B. You can get to choose where your site is listed. Most of the time the webmaster will not change the page your site is listed in.

C. Your site could be picked up for listing in other new directories.

D. You can get some decent amount of traffic since you will have a featured or sponsored listing in the directory. This means your website will be at the top of the page where it is listed.

E. Your site will get page rank passed to it from the listing page if it has good page rank.

Okay lets build these back links. Firstly bear in mind that there are thousands of directories on the web. They are also of different kinds, There are niche and general directories. So if any one directory doesn’t satisfy you search out another.

1. Search out the directories with the least price and highest page rank at that price.
2. Browse to the page (category or sub category) you want to submit your site to and make sure it has a good page rank. For a page rank 6 directory, you could typically find a page rank 4 page to list your site in. If no page or category exist for a good page rank, move to another directory.
3. Choose featured listing without additional listings. Offer for featured listings with additional pages are normal higher in price than for directories without. The additional listings will not add any value in terms of page rank to your additional listed pages because most of the time the pages where you are allowed to list additional pages have zero page rank. Since you aim to build many back links through paid directories you do not want to waste your money.
4. Some directories offer permanent listing and yearly listing. Choose permanent listing so your credit card is not charged every year. Both provide same value.
5. Make sure there are not more than 20 to 30 other outgoing links on the page you will listed in. Having many outgoing links on the page dilutes the page rank passed to your site.

To conclude, bear in mind that the acquisition of quality back links to your website is a long time process. List which directories to submit to if you are doing the submission yourself or hire it out so that you can quickly build up the back links fast.

The Author, Salihu brahim, is the owner of 1st-general.com. A free general web directory listing quality websites.

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