Building high quality incoming links to your website is one of the most important steps you can take to increase traffic and improve search engine rankings. With that being the case, it amazes me how many website owners overlook the very simple step of submitting their websites to the Internet’s major link directories.

I wrote about the importance of incoming links for search engine rankings in a previous post entitled Incoming Links: The Missing Ingredient. In a nutshell, you can think of incoming links as votes in a popularity contest and the search engines just so happen to be the judges of that contest. The more incoming, and the better the quality of those incoming links, the better you will come out in this popularity contest, and the higher your site will rank.

So with all of this in mind, submitting your site to web directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your website. You can think of link directories sort of like an online version of the Yellow Pages. Link directories have vast amounts of listings that are organized by topic. Each listing within the directory will have a brief description along with a link going to the listed site’s home page. There are also special interest link directories that only have listings on a certain kind of topic (business website directories, sports website directories, gambling website directories, etc.) Many individuals that are searching for a particular type of web site will use link directories as an alternative to doing a regular search engine query.

Upon submitting to a link directory, your listing will either be accepted or rejected depending on whether or not your site content is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. When your site is accepted, it means the link directory considers your site to be a credible source of information for a specific topic. In turn, the search engines view this as a strong vote for your website and thus weigh incoming from web directories quite heavily in their overall algorithm. So naturally you will want to have your website placed on as many link directories as possible. /p>

Again, there are three primary reasons to submit your site to link directories.

1. Your site will get targeted traffic when people search the directory for your type of site.

2. Your search engine rankings will improve from an increase in your link popularity.

3. Links from web directories will help the pages of your website get found and indexed by the search engines much more quickly.

Whether you do it yourself or have a web company do it for you, do not overlook this all important step of the SEO process.