Submitting your web site to the different online directories is an effective part of any Link Popularity campaign. While your traffic from many directories may be insignificant or irrelevant, appropriate incoming links to your website will help in your overall search engine link popularity.
Paying for your directory submission can be a huge waste of funds. You can get just as good a result from submitting to free directories. Personally, I wouldnt advise you pay for what you can get free elsewhere.
The best directories to submit your site to are Search Engine Friendly directories (those that actually have your site URL listed at some point, rather than outlinks that are simply code). Some will ask for a reciprocal link, some will not. One list of non-reciprocal directories is at http://www.Pimp-Url.com . Opinion at the moment is suggesting that non-reciprocal or one-way links are better, although any relevant link is useful. Directories that do not encode outgoing links will help your websites Search Engine Ranking.
A web directory is similar an online phone white pages. It contains listings of web sites arranged by category. While most web directories dont provide a lot of traffic it is still important to have your site listed in as many as possible. It helps build your web presence, assists with your sites page rank and link popularity.
When looking for directories to submit your site to, the following are good places to start. Before doing this, make sure that the directory you are submitting to permits you to both submit URLs other than your home page (some only allow top level submission), and for the same site to be submitted to different categories (not all directories permit what are essentially multiple submissions of the same website). This will work especially if you have online tools or directories (such as your links page) on your site that are useful and appropriate to add to other directory categories. Choose the related directory category for your website. Most directories will have many categories you can submit your site to. Decide on the one that is most relevant, preferably a keyword that you are aiming for high search engine ranking in, and try to submit to the identical or similar category in every directory, at least for your main page. This will increase the ranking of your site relating to the keyword chosen.
Submit to different categories as long as your website is suitable to those categories. This will increase the number of incoming links to your website. Writing the title for your website is very important. Try to include a keyword you are aiming for ranking in the title, but make the use of it appropriate. Describe your website in a way that will attract visitors. The length of your description will vary from directory to directory, but most will be under 250 characters. Some will allow up to one thousand characters, and in those cases write the most inclusive description of your site and its features that you can. It is a good idea to write several descriptions of different lengths, say from under 50 characters for a brief overview, to around 150 characters for a fuller description, up to two hunderd and fifty characters for a yet more all-inclusive listing, and finally a full description as previously mentioned for over 250 characters. Keep your listing pertinent to your website, insert keywords where applicable and appropriate, but do not just submit a keyword listing, as most directories will reject your submission. Save all your descriptions in a text file, and just copy & paste into the descriptions boxes when needed rather than typing the same descriptions out again and again.
Again, as with the description suggested above, the amount of keywords you can use will vary from directory to directory. Some will not give the option, some will allow you numbers of keywords, whilst others go by numbers of characters. Make a list of all suitable keywords for your site, from most powerful to least, and basically keep adding keywords until either you get to the bottom of your list (unlikely unless your list is really short) or you run out allowed characters/keywords. Check what keywords your competitors are going for if you need thought. This can often be performed by viewing the source of a web page and checking the META tags. Again, save your keywords to a text file.
Make sure also you add your URLs to all of these directory sites
http://bestpagrank.info
http://bestquickpr.info
Here are some FREE directories that you can submit your Website URLs too. If you want to have your links at the top iof the list - for $4 or $5 you can have them bumped up (darn good advertising... cheap)!!!!
http://bestpagrank.info
http://freepagerank.info
http://newpagrank.info
http://prlistplus.info
http://prlistplus.info
http://bestquickpr.info