One popular option is Article submission. There are two ways to build up backlinks with this tactic. First, you may pepper links to your own websites within the articles you write, since many article directories allow links to be submitted within the submissions. Secondly, each article will have a link pointing to your site at the bottom of the submission, in order to show who the original author of the article is. These links are especially effective because many people will use articles from these directories on their own sites. Whenever your article is used on someone else’s site, you gain even more backlinks. This means that the return you get is nearly perpetual!

A second option is to submit your website to website directories. These websites include a link to your site as well as a short description. These links are especially effective if you submit your website to many directories within a short period of time (say, a month or two), assuming that all of the directories are relevant to the content on your website.

Last, but definitely not least, is the option of Social Bookmarking. Sites like Digg, Mixx, and etc. are perfect for building backlinks. Each page that you submit will get you a permanent backlink – and these are especially powerful in the eyes of the search engines because most social bookmarking websites are listed as “authority” websites. And as the name would imply, a link from an authority website is very effective in boosting your results in the search engines. As with article submissions, an effectively perpetual return comes from social bookmarking. If your content is interesting to those who pass by, chances are that they will “vote it up”, meaning that more people will be likely to visit your website. Especially interesting content usually ends up being blogged about or shared on people’s homepages – meaning even more free links for you.

Don’t feel like you need to choose one of these three tactics. The best thing to do is to do all three of them in tandem! By diversifying the source of your backlinks, your website will become even more trusted in the eyes of the search engines. Once you’ve got the trust of the search engines, it is much easier for your website to climb up and attain a more visible placement in the search results.

Technorati Tags: Articles, backlinks, Bookmarking, building, Directories, Social, Through

A web directory is different from a search engine in that their display of links is not pulled up by keywords (the search terms you type into an engine), instead listing websites by category. The category a particular website falls into depends on its content as a whole instead of the content of just one page or by keywords. This means that a website will only come up on one or two categories. Web directories allow site owners to submit their links; from there, an editorial team decides on the appropriate category for the site.

RSS directories are somewhat similar to Web directories, but have collections of RSS feeds instead of links to websites.

Directories in General

There are directories which are very general, listing websites of all types in one place. There are also some niche directories which list web pages only in certain languages or are targeted towards one area of interest.

One popular general Web directory is the Open Directory Project. This is one of the best known Web directories; it is well liked for its large number of categories and large amount of listings in each. The ODP is also used by search engines and even other Web directories.

People often debate the usefulness of Web directories to websites; search engines use this information (particularly ODP’s) without really incorporating any of the data. Many search engines test using clustering, making them somewhat less useful for site owners. A lot of work has gone into building a simpler directory development process, using scripts to automate the link submission process or by using PHP. Social bookmarking software for the web has also brought new ideas to the process of categorization, through tagging websites by content (think about del.icio.us and other Social Bookmarking applications).

Why Use Directories For More Targeted Website Traffic?

Let us suppose that a website receives only a small amount of traffic from a directory as opposed to that coming in from search engines. However, you do not necessarily need to submit links to Web directories.

Targeted website traffic is more often the result of a directory search; someone looking through directories is likely to be looking for something in particular; something which meets a specific need. This targeted traffic is far more likely to be a prospective customer than is someone who just happens upon your site accidentally.

Search engines give a ranking to website or link directories, especially those which are niche-oriented. These niche directories are more commonly run by humans rather than by computers, making them a more reliable source of information and the links within them more credible, since they are human-evaluated.

Technorati Tags: Directories, More, Targeted, Traffic, Using, Website