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The amount of traffic that your website receives is directly related to the amount and quality of your inbound links. In most cases you should focus on quality first, and Michael Martinez does a great job of explaining this in one of his recent articles on SEOmoz.

Michael puts directory links into three categories “Yahoo Class Links”, “CNN Class Links”, and “Business Class Links” and explains the criteria for each. This article is a good read for people who cannot figure out why their website is ranking below a site with half as many links.

That being said, I still suggest grabbing the low hanging fruit first, and in this case we are talking about directories. Directory submission should be the first step taken when building links. Be aware, though, that not all directories are worth your time and money. Many of them require reciprocal linking that will drain your link value, and some don’t even rank in SERP’s. However if a particular directory will help drive traffic to your site then by all means you should submit to it.

There has been a bit of debate concerning the value of directories (for SEO), and there are some good reports on this subject. SEO Book is probably one of the best I’ve seen so far. In his article, Aaron addresses “quality signals”, like ad ratio, quality ratio, SERP ranking, and relevancy, that contribute to the value of directories.

The Comit Technologies’ link building team has conducted research that has helped them identify the 26 best directories to submit your site to. These are all trusted/human reviewed directories that pass on page rank and link value. They begin every link building campaign by manually submitting to each of these directories. Through these submissions alone I have noticed increases in website traffic and better search engine rankings.

Submitting your sites to directories can give you a quick boost in the search engines, but do not rely on them. It is imperative that you have an assortment of links from different types of relevant websites. Having only directory links will not work.

Good Luck
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Linking, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.