Successful Do-It-Yourself Directory Submission and Link Building

If you are taking the time to read this article, then you know the importance of link building for your website.  You also know that one of the ways to build links is through directory submission.  You also know that you can pay to have your website submitted to thousands of directories, or that you can do it yourself.

In this article you will learn how to maximize your link building strategy by submitting your website to directories and making those links count.

The Problem

Submitting your website to thousands of directories is a boring, tedious and necessary task if you want to increase the number of backlinks to your site.  Everyone who submits to directories knows that in most cases your link is not approved right away.  It can take days, weeks and sometimes months for your link to be manually approved.  There is no way around this wait time, and most of us can live with that.

What most people don’t consider is that after their website has been approved by the directory, they must now wait for Google and the other search engines to crawl the page where the link is listed.  If you have ever taken the time to find your link in a directory that has approved your site and viewed the ‘Cached Snapshot of Page’ with the Google Page Rank button on your Google Toolbar, then you will find that 9 times out of 10 Google has never crawled the page where the link is.

Most people know that you can wait months and months to have Google crawl an internal page on your website.  So as you can see, you can wait months for your website to be accepted by the directories, and months for Google to crawl the pages with your links.

The Solution

Most people know that blogs get crawled often by Google and the other search engines.  By design, blogs tend to have new content posted regularly and are set up in such a way that Google can easily crawl that content.  It only takes one subscriber to a blog to make Google crawl it every time there is a new post. 

1. Create a blog by going to blogger.com, or any other free blog site.  Blogger.com is part of Google, so you can’t go wrong by signing up for a free account there.  It takes just a few minutes to set up the blog.
2. Subscribe to your newly created blog by adding it to your iGoogle and My Yahoo! home pages.  You can use any other means of subscribing, but ultimately you want Google and Yahoo to crawl your blog, so why not use their free services.
3. Whenever you receive a confirmation email from a directory that you submitted to, find your link in the directory and copy the page’s address and past it into a new post on your new blog and publish it.

Google usually will crawl your blog within a few hours after a new post.  Wait 24 hours before you delete the post to be sure that it has been crawled. 

Take the process one step further by finding your link on multiple pages in the directories.  Many directories have a ‘Detail’ page dedicated to your site.  All directories will have your site listed on a ‘Category’ page.  Once you’ve confirmed that your site has been listed in a directory, go to the ‘Latest Links’ page and see if your site is there as well.  In this way, you can many times find your site in three separate locations in one directory site, giving you 3 backlinks to your website.  Paste all of the addresses into your blog post to maximize your link building strategy.

This is a proven and successful method to make the most out of your time when submitting your website to directories.  Watch the number of backlinks to your site grow by using this process to get the most out of your link building efforts!