Gaining Backlinks With SEO Friendly Web Directories

Once you’ve built a new website and got it ready to receive visitors, you need to get visitors. There are many techniques for getting traffic to your site, but the best way is organically via the search engines. Something that helps gain good rankings in search engines are backlinks. An easy way to gain free backlinks is to submit your site details to a number of free web directories.

Web directories are essentially databases of links about websites. These directories are picked up by the search engines and the links to your site are noticed. Backlinks are one of many factors used by search engines that affect what position your site appears in the search results.

In this step-by-step tutorial I’ll show you how to submit your website details to completely free web directories. Usually the process of filling in your details on a web directory involves a lot of copy and paste work. Therefore I’ll show you how you can save a great deal of time using a great tool for Internet Explorer and Firefox called RoboForm.

Finding good web directories

We want a web directory that will allow us to use our desired anchor text and provide a static link back to our website. There’s only one list of web directories that I would ever consider using, and that’s the VileSilencer SEO Friendly Free Directory List.

The chap who runs the site regularly maintains the very useful list of free directories that actually have SEO value when it comes to backlinks. At the time of writing, there are over 500 free general web directories that you can submit your site to. Plenty for you to get started with! Simply put, if you bother submitting your site to any directory, make sure it’s in this list. At then you can be fairly sure that it will count for something.

When you download the Microsoft Excel document containing the list of free directories, head straight for the general tab. This contains all of the generic free directories you can submit to. As VileSilencer says, the links that are in green have shown a proven track record to be any good.

What do directories need to know?

We’ll start off with a directory that has a good track record. At the time of writing, Directory Fire still accepts free directory submissions, and I’ll use that directory as an example. Typically, directories need to know the following information:

• The title of your site
• The URL of your site
• A short description of your site (around 200 to 300 characters)
• Your name
• Your email address (to receive confirmation of accepting your link or rejecting it)
• The category to which you site belongs
• Sometimes keywords relating to your site’s niche are asked for

You can see what a link submission page for a directory looks like above. Most directories have some kind of acceptance policy or conditions that you must follow in order that they accept your link.

The conditions of link acceptance are usually on the link submission page. Do read these policies and obey them if you want your link to be accepted. Generally the policies relate to not taking advantage of the directory with spam or obscene content. In this example, there are no stated rules.

How to submit your link

Probably the most important aspect of submitting a link to a web directory is finding the right category. You want to find the deepest and most relevant category in the directory that matches your site’s niche or topic area. The better you choose your category, the more likely your link is to be accepted.

The search facility is a very useful and quick way to get ideas on what category might be a good choice. This is because as you can find other sites related to your own that have already been accepted for a given category.

For this example, I am going to be submitting details for PowerDosh. PowerDosh helps you to create, identify and develop opportunities for yourself that makes you some extra money. Therefore I have chosen Business - Business Opportunities as the correct category. In this category, you’ll see some websites already in that category that are related to making extra cash.

Once I have found this category, I can submit a link to this category. So therefore I click on the Submit Link text and enter all my details. You’ll notice a box that says reciprocal link. Usually you would leave this box blank as you are not typically going to be linking to these directories from your sites.

You’ll also notice a CAPTCHA image which is to help avoid automated submissions by software. The directory owner would be swamped if they had to deal with automated submissions too!

Once you’ve entered all the details, you click on the Submit or OK or Continue button. If there are any errors, then the directory will tell you on the submission page. Otherwise it will say that the submission has been added to the queue.

When the directory owner gets some time, your listing will hopefully be approved and you’ll hopefully get a backlink too. Do this plenty of times to other free directories in the list, and you should gain some free backlinks that just need a bit of your time.

Adding a degree of automation

Once you’ve started copying and pasting your details into a few directories, you’ll quickly get fed up doing it! So a great utility that I’ve been using for a long time is called RoboForm. RoboForm is a great tool for memorising your passwords but is also a very impressive form-filling tool. It helps you to fill in long registration forms in a single click! It uses the same data for IE and Firefox, so you can use your favourite web browser too.

So here’s how you use RoboForm to fill in those directory submissions in a single click.

1) Installing RoboForm

RoboForm has a 30-day free trial, which is a good length of time to find out if you like it or not. I found that I couldn’t do without it, so I paid for the full registered version for just less than $30. For the hassle it’s saved, it’s been well worth the investment. A month is about the right length of time to see if the software suits you, but I’m sure it will suit most of you.

Download RoboForm and install it. I’ll assume you’re comfortable with how to install software. Just follow the instructions as it installs. When you next open your web browser, you should see it all ready and waiting for you.

2) Creating a Form Filling Identity

Now we want to create a profile for the site we’re promoting. So click on the RoboForm toolbar button, then Identities -> New… and you’ll see a window like the one above. Fill in the simple information, such as Name, Email Address and Website on the tabs listed below.

• Person tab
  • Name
  • Email Address
• Business tab
  • Website

For your email address, make sure you use an email address that’s not your primary email address. You will be getting a lot of emails sent to that email address, so you don’t want to clog up your normal inbox. You can see my preferred technique is to use directory@yoursite.com to differentiate it from my normal email address.

Now the really useful tab is the Custom tab. In the 30-day trial version of RoboForm, we have only 3 custom fields that we can use. However, that’s plenty for us.

In the field name section, we put in the label of the form field we want to fill. If you look back at the submission page on the directory, we have Title: and Description:. So put each of those words in the Field Name section in the RoboForm window. In the Field Value section, put the title of your website and the description of your site respectively.

To save your details, click on the Save & Close button.

3) Using the RoboForm identity

If we look at the directory again, click on the Submit Link hyperlink once you have chosen the correct category. We want a free regular link, so I check that option. I then click on the identity name button (PowerDosh in my case). RoboForm then fills in all of my details for me!

Note: When you get a message about the custom title field overwriting the standard title field, that’s ok. Just agree. It means that the custom field name is used in preference to using Mr, Mrs, Miss, etc.

RoboForm has not filled in the form completely perfectly, as has put our site in the Reciprocal Link URL and CAPTCHA Code sections. Therefore we remove those manually and submit our link to the directory.

We then get a link submitted success message, and we’re done!

Conclusion

Submitting site details to a web directory is a cheap and easy way to gain a backlink. Although the approval rates for directories do vary, submitting links manually in this way greatly improves the acceptance ratio. If you’re starting a website with very little investment capital, then doing your own directory submissions saves you cash!

RoboForm has other great uses, and I’ll come back to them in a later article! This tutorial has also been entered in the Daily Blog Tips Tutorial Competition too!