One of element of a successful link building strategy is free directory submissions. Submitting your site to various free directories should not be your only tactic but this can be a very useful supplement to your organic link building as well as increase your online visibility.
Free directories are great because… well, they’re free! The quality and strength of these links will vary between directories but this tactic is still worth your time. But how do you find the free directories that would be good links for your site? Here are four ways to find free directories.
List of standard free directories
Instead of searching, how about if we just give you a list of free directories to start with? That’s easy enough. Strongest Links has complied a very helpful list of directories (free and paid). Peruse this list and find the free directories that would be helpful to your link building strategy.
Yahoo Site Explorer
Why re-invent the wheel? You can use Yahoo Site Explorer to see where you competitors are generating links. Within YSE’s result listings you can search for the free directory links. And here a couple things to keep in mind when running a search through YSE:
- You want to view the ‘inlinks’ tab
- Under ’showlinks’ you want to select ”except from this domain”
These will ensure that you are not pulling inbound links from your own site, and only external links. Here is a quick screen shot of what a search results page looks like:
Path-to-Inclusion search
Conducting a little reconnaissance can be a very fruitful tactic when looking for free directories. After you se Yahoo Site Explore, you can run path-to-inclusion queries within Yahoo and MSN in order to discover additional directories. To run this kind of query within Yahoo or MSN, you can just type in:
linkdomain:competitorssite.com “submit site”
The “competitorssite.com” is where you would enter your competitor’s URL. This will also show you where your competitor’s are gaining links from directories. You can replace “submit site” with various phrases that are related to directory submissions such as “directory,” “add URL” or “suggest a link.”
Plain Old Search Query
Yes, you can take your most valuable keywords and run queries through Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can append “directory” or “listings” on to these keywords. This will help you find additional free directories that your competitors may not be utilizing yet.
These four tactics will help you build a robust list of free directories for your link building strategy. Now, get out there and find those free directories and start submitting!
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
Just so you know, your link to the list of free directories points at your wordpress admin page
@Berto: How the heck did that happen?! Thanks for the note. Fixed!
interesting article, you can never know too much about this stuff. I think.
I have been trying to build links for my site but I have done a lot of research and google says that linking to directories do not really help your rankings. Do you think thats true or do you think google is just trying to get people away from linking to only directories or link farms?