If you’re serious about generating new customers through online methods, you need to show up in the rankings.

While there are a ton of things you can do, still, the most effective means to get higher in search engine rankings is by getting links from other sites.

This can be a long, tedious process and you really should have someone who knows what they’re doing to come up with a good strategy. One of the biggest impact steps that you can take is by getting your website listed in hand-edited directories.

What are Directories?

These are listings of websites/businesses by category that are manually added and updated and not automatically determined by a program like Google.

The benefit of these sites is that they are considered “authority” sites and links from there are given a lot of credit from the search engines that rank your sites automatically. For example, one link from DMOZ is roughly worth the equivalent of links from 40 other websites. These are links that could take you weeks to get.

You Get What You Pay For

Everyone is looking for free links from directories. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for. Free submission directories are not maintained well enough to be considered an authority site by the search engines. If they did have something of value, do you think they would really be giving it away for free?

A lot of people balk at the high fees of website directories. Yahoo has a directory that costs $299 per year and Business.com has one that is $199 per year. Somebody made a point recently which I thought made total sense – if you aren’t willing to invest up to $1,000 to submit your website to directories, why do you even have a website?

The ROI you will get from the higher rankings that come from being listed in these top tier directories will far exceed the costs you incur. If there is no way that you can get at least $1,000 in profit from your website, that means that you aren’t attracting any new customers from your website. And if you aren’t getting any new customers, you don’t need a website!

Top Level Directories that Every Business Owner Should Submit Their Website To

• Yahoo! - http://dir.yahoo.com/
• Open Directory Project – http://www.dmoz.org
• Starting Point - http://www.stpt.com/
• Ezilon - http://www.ezilon.com/
• Search Sight - http://www.searchsight.com/
• Business.com - http://www.business.com/
• Best of the Web - http://www.botw.org/

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