For some time now I have been making adjustments to our company’s search engine. My goal was to guarantee placement in one of the top positions of a list of Google search results. I believed that this could be done by carefully balancing a combination of keywords, meta tags and actual site content, which I had always thought to be the most important factor.
However, it seems that quality content on a website is not enough to garner top rankings in a Google search. Many webmasters and SEO experts suggest that the new key is link building, and that the site with the most backlinks from other sites is the one which lands on top of Google’s search results. With this in mind, I decided to focus my efforts on backlinks.
But backlinks are not something you can automatically build into your site, so how could I get them? The first thing I considered was using web directories. These are online catalogues which accept links to different sites and organize them according to the site content. Some are free, while others charge a fee to list your site. Some directories require a reciprocal link in return. There are also submission services that, for a fee, will submit your site to web directories for you. Or you can use a directory submission tool to do this yourself.
I used a free directory submission tool to submit my site to almost 2000 web directories. These tools have a built-in database of directories, so I didn’t have to search them out myself and the entire process took only a few days. The tool also allowed me to use different anchor texts and descriptions for my site, so each submission looked unique. After submission, my site went to the directories’ validation queue. This process takes days or even weeks, so don’t expect instant improvements in your Google search ranking.
WordPress Blogs is another good way to get backlinks. Users read articles or stories and leave comments by providing their name, URL and e-mail address. If you use your keywords as your name and your site address as your URL, then when your comment is posted it becomes a backlink to your website. I only posted comments in blogs that were relevant to our company’s business, and only when I had a relevant comment to make. Otherwise this could be considered spamming, and I don’t condone that. Comments that have already been posted by others will give you an idea of what sort of comment you should leave.
