SEO Link Building – A Professional SEO Approach

Document Insight:

Companies have been spending millions of dollars in promoting their websites. It is because they have a very clear objective in mind i.e., to improve Page Ranking. It has been found that websites ranked on first page of the Search Engine result receives 80% of the total traffic followed by second page which receives more than 19% of traffic and rest of the pages receive less than 1% of it. So, better you are ranked on Search Engines chances of people visiting your website increases resulting in more business.

Going by the concept I started exploring the ways to promote my company's website – Growth Technosoft.  Because I had no experience as a SEO I started searching on Internet the ways of promoting website. After some effort I found articles about SEO techniques that introduced me to the term "Link Building". On exploring it further I found that it is a very innovative way of promoting one's website wherein you and the webmaster of other website exchange link. Let me define it further -

"Link Building is a process in which two webmasters agree to display the hyperlink of each other's website on their website."

Search Engines rank those websites better that have more number of quality back links i.e., links referring their website. Websites that accepts to exchange links generally displays a HTML code (as below) to be hosted on other website.

<a href="http://www.growthtechnosoft.com/">Growth Technosoft is in the field of Web Designing, CMS, eCommerce Internet Marketing and other web solutions. We have a team of web designers, SEO experts, eCommerce website designers and quality assurance personnel who will deliver your project exactly according to your specifications. </a>

I was very clear about the term and purpose of Link Building and the benefits of exchanging links.

Now, why would somebody take that much of pain and update page of his website with my company's link? I again went to the Search Engine for the answer and got the reply – Web Directory Listing. These are professionally managed websites dedicated to Link Exchange wherein you submit the details of your site and update your site with the given link of the directory. It reminds me of "Yellow Pages" in a new avtaar i.e., "Digital Yellow Pages".

So, here is the purpose of this document – "To efficiently manage Directory Listing."

While submitting URL of Growth Technosoft to various directories I came across various problems and finally devised the right way to manage these listings efficiently. I would share my experiences in this tutorial. To start with I will explain the efficient way to manage Directory Listing followed by issues that were encountered.

Preparing Efficiently:

Success in any work lies in 90% planning and 10% execution. I follow this basic principle and before going for Directory Submission I will share what goes into initial preparation.

On exploring some of the Directory websites I found that these websites provides a link generally titled "Submit Link" or "Add Link" followed by a form to accept Directory Listing. These forms have a specific set of text boxes to accept listing information and that too in specific order. There is no defined standard for the forms but in fact it is a practice which has matured with time.

Generally these forms start with a set of "Terms & Conditions" to be agreed upon for adding link to the directory, followed by a set of choice asking you the nature of link submission. It can be a paid submission with option of various tenures or can be a free submission with generally two options i.e., with or without reciprocation. I planned to go for free submission with reciprocation because most websites offered for a quicker approval for this category.  

Then, comes the "Title" textbox which generally accepts 250 characters. There are sites which may have more or less number of characters limitation but in most cases it was 250 chars. So, this gave me first piece of information required for initial preparation. I created a new document file and named it as "Directory Listing Content" and noted down the name of first field as "Title". I will summarize the purpose of this document later on but for now just stay with me.

The next textbox is generally "Add URL" to accept URL or the domain of your company. Always mention the complete URL along with http protocol like http://www.growthtechnosoft.com/. This is second piece of information but is constant in nature. I added the same in the document with the title "Add URL".

After that is a"Description" field. You can add the details about your product or services, or can enter the introduction of your company etc. depending upon your requirement. Most sites have set the length to 500 characters. Add this too into the document with the title "Description".

META Tag and META Description are the fields after "Description". I found equal number of sites requiring and not requiring this set of information. However, wherever this information was required META Tag field was mandatory with a condition to add keywords or phrases in a comma separated manner. For all my link submission I used META Tag and skipped META Description with no specific reason. Hence, add META Tag field in our document file.

Then come some basic requirement like "Name", "Email". This set of information is constant. Add this to into the document.

Now you are aware of the basic information which needs to be entered into the submission form. As we have selected to reciprocate link, the next set of information is related to it. There is a field to enter the URL of your site where you have hosted the link of respective directory followed by Reciprocate HTML code of the directory. Copy and paste the given HTML code onto your site and mention the URL of hosted page into Reciprocate URL field. You don't need to copy this into "Directory Listing Content" document as it may vary from link to link.

Some of the listing submission forms may also have CAPTCHA implemented to protect site from spam through automatic submission. An image of the human readable code is shown with a field to accept the code for validation. There may also be a checkbox to check for accepting submission "Terms & conditions".

Now a quick summarization –

Your "Directory Listing Content" file must have following fields -

• Title
• Add URL
• Description
• META Tag
• Name
• Email

I have organized this document with the given set of fields as under –

I made multiple sets of "Title", "Description", and "META Tag" to represent Growth Technosoft in different variety. I would recommend you to make such multiple sets.

This completes your "Directory Listing Content" file and you are ready to do "Directory Submission". Let's now go on to the submission management part. For this I created another file in a spreadsheet and named it as "Directory Listing List".

The information I planned to capture in this file is as under –

• Site URL – Home Page URL of the directory website
• Submission URL – URL of the submission form
• Reciprocate HTML Code – HTML code need to be hosted on our website
• Link Tracker code – A serial no. to check on which page this link has been hosted
• Status – Status of this link. Registered and after approval Visible
• Status date
• Login name – Some websites require registration before submission
• Password

I used this file as a link manager, tracker, and planner. It helped answer the following queries –

• Where all I have submitted my website?
• On which page of my website I have hosted the link of respective directory?
• What is the status of the directory submission?
• It also helps me in preventing duplicate submission.
• And, lastly whenever I find new directory website I just keep on adding that to this file so that whenever I plan to make new submissions I know to submit it.

With this we are completely ready for "Directory Submission" with the  files -

• Directory Listing Content – Containing content to be posted on website
• Directory Listing List – List of websites where the content has to be posted

Common Problems:

While doing directory submission I came across certain problems. I hope mentioning these problems will help other SEOs in improving their performance and increase their success rate.

1. Read the Submission terms - It is important to read the Terms and Conditions for submitting to the directory. Most of the directories go by the standard set of terms like -
• obscenity or illegal check,
• sites to be in English,
• no redirection to other site,
• under construction sites check,  
• Multiple submission not allowed
• Subdomain site submission not allowed
• No use of special characters and HTML code in Title and Description

But some may have specific terms like -

• They accept URL from specific country. When I was submitting to directories of Canada there was a common term saying domain name must have .ca


• Some of the directories may accept submission from specific industry and may not be general web directories. In that case make sure to submit only if your site lies in that category.

After filling the whole form for listing, some of the websites have a checkbox to check to accept given Terms and Conditions. Make sure you do not forget to check that box.

2. Listing Category – Listing your site in a right category gives better results and reduces chances of rejection during approval process. This makes it important to know the nature of business before submission and accordingly select the appropriate category and subcategory.
• There are changes that the exact category of your business may not be there or there may be many close meaning categories available. So select the closest category for the listing.
• I came across directories where categories shown where legitimate whereas all subcategories contain obscene terms. So I didn’t go for directory submission to there sites as they lack trust.

3. CAPTCHA - Implementing CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a common practice these days to control automatic directory submission. I came across certain problems related to this during Directory submission.


• Most encountered problem was that of the size of CAPTCHA. The textbox available to accept CAPTCHA characters was smaller in size and not accepting all the CAPTCHA characters. On submission it gave an "Invalid Code" message.


• There were certain cases where the CAPTCHA was case sensitive i.e., you need to type in the correct case.


• There is a site http://www.captcha.net/ providing free CAPTCHA services. Many times this site provides CAPTCHA code in two set of characters. So be sure to provide a space between both the set of characters.

4. Reciprocate Link code – Almost all directory listing sites that I came across had the condition to host their link on my website for free listing on their directory. While hosting the given Reciprocate HTML code I came across following issues -


• In my initial submission I used to modify the Reciprocate HTML code with addition of "target" attribute and CSS "class" attributes so as to make it look more presentable. This landed me in a big trouble with all links that I hosted as they were not recognized by the directory listing site. I checked and rechecked but in vain. Finally, I thought of dropping the idea of additional attributes and tested with exact HTML code with one or two websites. To my surprise it worked. This made me conclude that directory listing sites search for exact string they display, while submitting, rather then just their URL.


• URL given in the anchor tag of the HTML code may be different than that you are visiting and submitting on. It is advisable to check the other URL also before adding it to your site.


• Reciprocate HTML code may have an "ID" attribute with some value assigned to it. This value changes everytime you visit the website. So if you have noted down the Reciprocate HTML code from this website for submitting to it at later stage into Directory Listing List file then it will become useless as next time you will get a new code. For such websites update your website with the latest Reciprocate HTML code and then do directory submission.

5. Website errors – I also came across some directory website errors. I simply removed their link from my website. These errors are –


• On submitting to some of the websites I encountered "Fatal error" message. Despite several tries the error persisted. So, it made me conclude that these websites are technically not competent enough to handle the business and not good enough to do listing on them.


• There were websites that gave me the message of "Bandwidth Limit Exceed". Now the nature of message shows that these directory listing companies lack sufficient infrastructure. Listing on such sites will not result in any business hence advisable not to list on these sites.

With this I complete sharing of my experiences with Link Submission and Link Building. I felt pleasure in writing this document and hope to keep contributing to the SEO community.

Other Resources:

Some of the popular web directories –

http://www.findelio.com/
http://www.dmoz.org/
http://www.directorycritic.com/

Feedback:

I would appreciate any constructive feedback on this document. Please let me have your Suggestions, Corrections, or Modification at the given email.

Manu Gupta
contact@growthtechnosoft.com

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