Submitting your sites to directories does any good in rankings? Are manual directory submissions any good for your sites? If you are an SEO for at least a couple of months, you should have heard directory submissions. Directory submissions are nothing but submitting your websites/ blogs to a good number of directory for inclusion. Typically the directory listings contain your website linked in Anchor Text (keywords of your sites). Web directories are sites that list various websites and blogs related to a certain niche (Topic). These web directories list your sites in them with a keyword linking to the URL of your site and about two three lines of description of your website. Most of these directories offer free listings that means you just have to submit your website to them and they will list your site within them for free if those are satisfied with your site quality and submission.
When you have decided to submit your websites to directories for backlinks, the first things you have to do is search for SEO-friendly web directory lists. There are a lot of these kind of web directories on the web. Some webmaster, SEO sites list the lists of various niche, seo friendly web directories. You just need to decide on a list to submit and then you can hire someone or some company which does the submission work and get the job done. If you want to do it on your own, you need to spend a couple of Tens of hours to submit a list of about one thousand web directories. Always, remember this: Your directory submissions should always be manual directory submissions. Don’t use any automated software to automatically submit to directories. Automated submissions can’t give you good results because most of the submissions fail to reach the last step of submission process.
You can use any of those semi-automatic directory submitters though. Almost all of those semi-automatic directory submitters don’t submit your site to the directories, instead they just help you browse through the directory faster to save you lots and lots of time and with those you can still submit to directories manually and get good results in less time. Although most of the directories offer free listings, there are some directories which only accept Reciprocal listings or Paid listings. Just ignore them, Those are not worth the time or money unless those are some very important directories like Yahoo directory. The directories you submit should be SEO friendly directories, that means they should offer Do-follow listings as well as they should be frequently visited and indexed by the crawlers of search engines. Almost all the top directories under one hundred thousand Alexa ranking are crawled and indexed regularly.
And coming to if directory submissions are any good for rankings in search engines, I can tell you from first-hand experience that directory submissions can get you to the first page of Google for low-medium to low competed keywords without you having to do any other link building. But your directory submissions should not look spammy to search engines. For that you need to use various Anchor Text (different keywords), various descriptions, various keywords. Suppose you are submitting your site to one thousand web directories. Then use different anchor text, different descriptions, different keywords for every 100 directories. So, at the end of the last directory submission, you would have submitted your website with 10 unique anchor texts, 10 unique and corresponding descriptions, and 10 different sets of keywords. That kind of directory submission strategy not only looks good in the eyes of search engines but also give you good rankings for different keywords. Finally, Directory Submissions are still worth the time or money spent. So, submit your websites to seo-friendly directories manually with the above given strategy and see the results for yourself in two to three months.