| What is and Who Uses It?
is a the method of gaining incoming links by going to a search engine (search engines) and requesting various sites to link to yours.
Many people believe that the best way to get links is to hire a service that does all of the grunt work for you. After all, building links is patience-testing and tedious. But others believe that there is still a place for manual link building in the small business world.
Manual link-building is becoming less and less frequently used in business but it remains to be one of the the most inexpensive and effective ways for small businesses to rank well in the search engines. And it works especially well for local-specific businesses.
Most would agree that it wouldn't be the smartest move for small shops and local businesses to spend months (or years) publishing articles and participating in social networking until they start to get enough of their content linked to in order to improve their search engine rankings. Even if they do offer great content, this does not mean they will be linked to. This is especially true for the types of businesses who don?t really need to do business over the Internet. They still need to be found on the Internet, however.
If you run a small business or you are doing sEO for a small business, keep in mind that it is okay to find some local directories and manually request some links. Of course, those few top paid directories like Yahoo, BOTW, and Business.com, are the ones that Google especially admires so it can't hurt to request help from them as well. You can especially win out if you don't have much competition. Just a well-optimized website and a few quality incoming links could easily get you on the first page of any of the major search engines.
Another reason you might want to go with manual directory submission (even if you aren't a small, local business) is because the most respected and reputable directories have their own custom application script which means you must submit to them manually. Automated tools simply cannot fill in those unique forms. So directory submission services that use automatic tools to submit usually end up submitting to lower quality directories that won't really do anything to improve the ranking of your site. While automatic submission tools can fill in the forms on certain submit pages, they don't always fill in the date properly so the submission may be incomplete. But it's not uncommon in a situation like this that the report you receive says your submission went through when in reality it didn't. If the category is not identified correctly, a service will fail to submit as well. These are just a few reasons you want to steer clear of submission services that use automated tools.
You can, however, opt for submission services that do the manual link building for you, without using automatic tools. |