Link building is the strategy of creating links to your website. The reason link building is so important for SEO is that the more relevant links to your website, from relevant and trusted sites, the greater your chances are of achieving higher rankings. The benefit of paid directories gives you fast inclusion, reliable one-way links, the ability to personally write anchor text (through listing text) and credibility through trusted links.
There are 3 main paid directories that SEO’s use, based on their potential for traffic and the quality link that it provides to your site:
1. Yahoo! Directory
2. Business.com
3. Best of the Web
Yahoo! Directory: The Yahoo! directory is one of the most well known paid directories. They were the first large scale directory of the Internet, and .Companies can list their sites by category, topic and location. Their reach is over 330 million unique visitors making Yahoo! one of the more highly traffic volume sites for link building. Yahoo! is also a very trustworthy site that provides relevant information which makes links from the Yahoo! Directory to your site even more beneficial to you and your rankings. Submitting to the Yahoo! directory is easy. Its cost is $299/year. Once you submit your site, it’s reviewed manually within 7 business days. Once approved, you can manage your listings online, update billing info, request changes to your listings, view invoices and more.
Business.com: Reaching more than 6 million unique visitors and over 65,000 categories in which to place your listings makes business.com a highly relevant, high traffic and greatly trusted directory that the search engines love. It’s especially a great source for B2B websites and is known for that specifically. Business.com helps business decision makers quickly find what they are looking for to manage and grow their business. 98% of business.com users are likely to be C-Level executives. Submitting your site via business.com literally takes less than 5 minutes. It’s human edited and typically gets approved within just a few days. The cost for a Business.com directory listing is $299/year like that of Yahoo!.
Best of the Web: or BOTW is frequently indexed by all major search engines. BOTW offers a 3 day site evaluation and over 100,000 categories in which you can choose from. In order to rank among the BOTW, your site must adhere to the strict criteria of editors who ensure that it contains substantive unique content, navigates in a user-friendly manner, has no broken links or pictures and is up and running constantly, etc. BOTW also recently launched its newest offering, a guide to the best in the world of blogs. Submitting your site to this directory again is a very simple process. After accepting the terms and conditions, you are asked some basic information about your site. BOTW costs $69.96 a year, or you can pay a one-time $249.95 fee for your listing.
There are other paid directories out there but these are the three we have used personally and find to be most beneficial when it comes to SEO link building. Some additional and popular paid directories not mentioned in this post are JoeAnt, Aviva and Starting Point. Again, the benefit of paid directories gives you fast inclusion, reliable one-way links, the ability to personally write anchor text (through listing text) and credibility through trusted links. All which help your site increase in SEO traffic and rankings.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
I’d like to know how many people who start up a site are actually submitting to Yahoo! Directory. If my initial marketing budget is $2000 (then many of the profits will go back into the budget), is it worth it?
I know my site is an SEO nightmare… an optimized version is coming soon, and when I launch that, I’m wondering if it’s worth spending 15% of the budget on this. My guess is no, not at this time.
Berto at PricePlow
I would say it depends one on how well you optimized your new site as I have seen “SEO Pros” do a horrible job (self claimed of course). Two how competitive is your market? How competitive are your head terms? If you can’t rank organically well for head terms how is your long tail SEO? All of these questions will better determine where to send/spend your $$$. If you rank #1 for your head terms then maybe the Yahoo! Dir isn’t for you–try some of the other (cheaper) directories I have pointed out. I will say that using good link juice is one very powerful SEO tool but the true worth depends on how competitive the market is and how well your site is optimized.
Top Directories
(In my opinion)
Dmoz (If you get in you have a golden ticket)
Yahoo! Dir (Good stuff for the right site)
Best of The Web (100 bones a year)
Go Guides($40 one time fee)
Joe Ant(same as Go Guides)
Skaffe ($40)
Gimpsy(again $40)