How to find the best search engine directories to increase your link popularity and performance
There are two things that you can add to your website that increases its search engine power.
These two components of a SEO are content and backlinks.
Content is the true power of a website. The more content, the more keywords your site will be listed under, and the better performance your site will have at the engines.
But having a content and information rich website is simply not enough.
With over 100,000,000 websites active on the Internet at any given moment, link popularity is another critical component that cannot be overlooked.
The more in-pointing links to your website from other credible websites, the better your search engine will perform.
Most webmasters understand that the easiest and most convenient way to secure quality high PR links is to get listed in a number of quality directories.
You can judge the quality of an inbound link coming from a directory by the PR and the traffic level of that site.
Really high quality directories will have a PR of five or above, and an Alexa traffic ranking of 100,000 or more.
This does not mean that directories with a lower PR or lower levels of traffic are not valuable, but when first building your inbound link popularity, focusing on the highest quality directories will give you optimal results.
After getting a solid foundation, you can continue building your link popularity with other directories even if they do not meet these high standards.
Do however use your judgment and do not fall for the link farms or free-for-alls.
Good directories are human edited for quality assurance purposes.
A link farm or free for all that offers a link to any website without any human moderation will not have any value, and might even hurt your search engine rankings.
As with anything else, it is best to play by the rules and avoid shortcuts that might land you in hot water.
You can search through thousands of free search engine directories, reciprocal directories, paid directories, and even smaller niche directories that might be suitable to list your website.
Build your link popularity and always remember that adding fresh content is also valuable, and you will have great success with your search engine marketing efforts.