Directory Submission and Social Bookmarking: Cheap And Easy SEO
There are a lot of ways to get your SEO on, and they range from the expensive and complex (custom blog creation, web 2.0 property linkrings) to the cheap and easy (directory submission, social bookmarking). Today, we’re going to take a look at that second category: cheap and easy SEO that anyone can wrap their minds around.
Directory Submission
The Internet is full of directories of all kinds. There are website directories, article directories, graphical directories, and many more. If you have the material to submit to a directory (and you can pass whatever rules it’s set to prevent just anyone from slapping stuff up on it’s portal), you’ve got an instant backlink just waiting to be taken advantage of.
Of course, it helps if the material is actually relevant to your website, and it helps even more if the directory uses dofollow links, but still, that’s not all that hard to accomplish. Granted, one single backlink from one single directory isn’t going to amount to much unless it’s one of the biggest directories of it’s type — and those big directories tend to have the strictest rules on what they’ll allow on their site. So you need either the expertise to navigate those rules or a massive list of lesser directories and a few hours to sit around and submit to all of them.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is what you do on all those popular sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and their ilk. It’s a quick and easy process in which you open an account and then turn in some bookmarks to your various web pages. Voila! Instant backlink, and just maybe someone will come across your bookmark and follow it on it’s own merit.
It’s not quite that easy, though, because not all social bookmarking sites use dofollow links, so you have to know which ones are worth submitting to. Also, if you drop even a small hint on your social profile on those bookmarking sites, the search engines will be able to tell that you opened the account and they’ll discount the value of those links down to nearly zero. There’s also the issue that social bookmarking sites take an ongoing investment if you intend to get any long-term traffic from them.
In the end, even the cheap and easy SEO is best done by the experts, it seems.