The Million Dollar Domain

Traffic: Link and Article Directories

September 30, 2008

When building traffic, one very important factor are backlinks. Your goal is to get as many links to your site as you can. Two of the most popular ways to build links are submitting your site to link directories and write articles and post them in article directories where you will link to your site at the end of the article in what’s called the author box or resource box.

Link directories are pretty much straightforward, you just submit your site or blogs link to some of the thousands of directories available on the web, make sure you use appropriate keywords and a nice description for your site. Also, always submit to the correct category on the directory as this will ensure your link is as targeted as it can be.

Submitting to link directories is very time consuming if you really want to build lots of links but you shouldn’t lose too much time on it all at once, just set a goal of submitting your site to X number of directories per day, say 5, 10 or 15 directories per day. This will allow your links to grow over time and also you won’t get too bored. You better spend your time building content than links, but fortunately if you build a few links per day that won’t take too much of your time.

Better than link directories are article directories, these are sites where you can submit articles or get articles for your website. On the end of each article submitted there is the resource/author/bio box, this is where you’ll write a small text about your site and link to it using your keywords. Then if people find your article worthy they will take your article (with link to your site) and post it on their sites/blogs. This can give you some very nice backlinks over time.

The downside with article submission is, most of the time, writing the article itself. If you have a blog, you can submit your blog post as if it was an article, just make sure it stands on it’s own and remove any reference to other blog posts. Article submission depends on each person, some people have some nice writing skills and submit a few articles per day, some are not so good and just submit a few per week, others have no article skills and either don’t submit at all, or outsource the writing to other people. There are people that will write articles about whatever you want for a small fee so if you can’t write some articles on your own you can look into that. Wither way, you should also try and set a goal of submitting X articles per week and that will insure you’ll constantly grow the number of links to your site.

Link and article submission may seem like a tedious chore, and yes, i personally also think so, but is a sure way to get links to your site, and in the end all it takes is a few hours per week to submit some links and articles that will, over time, increase your pagerank and site exposure.

Below are two huge lists of directories, you don’t have to submit to all of them, but I’ll list them anyway. Please note that I haven’t checked all links to ensure they’re still up as I basically only submit to some of the first 10 or 15 of the list.

You can find a huge list of article directories here, and an even bigger list of free link directories here.

That’s it for now, go ahead and start submitting your links to directories, a few a day, and you’ll be gaining pagerank and traffic pretty soon.