To increase visibility online is the core of every online business marketing strategy. Driving traffic to your website and getting noticed by search engines takes a lot of time and effort.
'Links' play a major role in determining your ranking position on the various search engines. Obtaining inbound links or back links in quantity and quality can influence your search engine rank immensely. One simple way to obtain back links is to submit your link to directories. Online directories exist for the sole purpose of providing links to web users to various sites categorized under relevant topics. "Directory submission" is a website optimization strategy that no website owner should ignore.
Directories catalog links for easy access to users. Much earlier, directories were the primary source for web users to find websites on various topics. Today search engines have taken over but directories have not lost their importance yet. You cannot obviously expect too much traffic from a directory submission. But you can expect an improvement in your search engine placement.
Here is how it works. When submitting to a directory, the major hindrance as well as the major benefit lies in the human editor. Your submission will be viewed by an actual person who determines how relevant and unique your website is. After passing his scrutiny and editing, your website will be accepted in the directory. This automatically establishes the credibility of your website; hence search engines will consider links submitted to directories.
Some directories even feed their databases to other directories and search engines. Search engines base a certain factor on directories in judging a website's popularity and relevance. Depending on the quality of the directory and the number of back links your website has, search engines will be able to determine your relevance and qualify your website accordingly.
Note how important listing in a directory is. If your website is low on content but rich in images, flash content, etc. search engines may not be able to categorize your website when the search spider visits your site. By submitting to a directory under a particular category, you allow the search engine to categorize your site under a relevant topic.
There are general and specific directories available online. Specific directories target only those websites based on a particular subject or field. No matter what your business is, odds are that directories will be available that cater specifically to it. There are also regional directories available which may be highly useful if your online business targets a local audience.
Importance of Keyword Research in Link Building
 Keyword Research is the building block for search engine optimization. Search engines utilize keywords or key phrases to identify web pages which are relevant to these terms. Finding keywords/ phrases which are relevant to your website and implementing them in your pages will help a search engine identify your webpage when a search is conducted for that particular keyword/ phrase. Keywords have to be implemented on-page as well as off-page for higher ranking..............
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What is Link Popularity?
Link popularity refers to the number of hyper-links pointing to a page on the Web. A popular Web site tends to have large numbers of these backlinks, and obscure Web pages have very few.
Link popularity is a factor in determining PageRank, and PageRank is part of what is used to determine where pages are ranked in Google search results.
Link Popularity tells you how many websites are linking to yours. Website popularity is becoming increasingly important, as many search engines are using this information as a ranking criterion. The more popular your site is, the better it is ranked on the search engines.
Most search engines are thought to place some emphasis on link popularity in their ranking algorithm. Some people believe that the number of sites pointing to your site is what determines your link popularity, and the more links there are, the higher your ranking will be. However, that is only partially true. The search engines (and those that program them) are not dumb. They are used to search engine spammers trying to cheat their way into getting a high ranking. Because of this, the search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a site, but the quality of those links.
There appear to be two types of links that get factored into the link popularity equation. Links from other sites that focus on the same keyword phrases your site focuses on, and links from relevant categories in major directories and industry specific portals. "Free For All" (FFA) sites, do not constitute quality links, so don't waste your $24.95 submitting your site to 500 of them. Links from sites that focus on topics that have nothing to do with your site probably won't help you win any link popularity contests, either.
How Does Link Popularity Work?
Here's an example of how I believe link popularity works:
Let's say that Bob's Pizza Palace Web site has a link to Joe's Men's Clothing store. This probably won't help Joe's link popularity for the keywords "men's clothing." However, if both Bob's Pizza Palace and Joe's Men's Clothing Store are both located in the city of Boston, and people are searching for "men's clothing in Boston," the quality of that link, may have just gone up a little. There's now a common thread (Boston) between the sites. It probably won't help for those people simply searching for men's clothing, but may help if they're searching specifically for stores in the City of Boston. A higher quality link for Joe, however, would be one from "Sam's Clothing Store Directory," which lists a whole bunch of clothing stores that can be found on the Internet. That is exactly the kind of link that the search engines would credit toward link popularity. The key is in having that common thread between the sites.
Do I need to worry about Link Popularity?
In general, there's no need for the average site to obsess over link popularity. From my experience, (and contrary to popular belief), link popularity constitutes only a very small element of most search engines' ranking algorithms. How much it actually boosts a site's ranking, is debatable. I have found that for most sites, simply having good representation in the major search Directories such as Yahoo!, Dmoz and LookSmart, can go a long way towards link popularity.
For sites that are trying to rank high with extremely competitive keywords, it may be helpful to actively search out links from other relevant Web sites. This doesn't mean you should go out and create a whole bunch of domains yourself and link them all together. It simply means you should look for sites that use the same keywords that your site uses, and see if they have a links page that they'd be willing place your link on. Industry specific portals/directories are also a great place to look for links.
Even if you don't care about link popularity, being listed on other relevant sites, is always a good idea. Very often, these types of links will bring more traffic to your site than a high search engine ranking will bring. Therefore, searching them out is often worth the time and effort.
How to get linked without even trying!
Interestingly enough, if your site is well written and provides a lot of useful information, you won't have to search out links at all. Other sites will link to yours of their own volition. We have seen this process in action with our Rank Write Roundtable site. Without actively requesting any links (other than the major Directories and a few sites that list email newsletters), many highly relevant sites have added Rank Write to their list of links. Each week, I find more and more sites that have added our link. This, of course, is the ideal, and isn't going to happen for every site. However, if done correctly, even some commercial sites might be able to benefit from this approach. If the commercial site adds some content, and if the content is unique and useful, other sites may want to link to it. You just need to be creative. For instance, Joe's Men's Clothing Store, could add some pages describing the latest trends in men's fashion. What's hot this season, and what's not. If Joe does a good job presenting this information, and updates it often, other fashion sites might add a link to Joe's site, because it adds value to their own site.
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