Sigh.

Here I am, talking about link building again. It seems like every second article is about link building in one  form or another. Nevertheless, link building is a vital element of SEO, especially for relatively new sites. So it has to be talked about (if you’re familiar with my articles, perhaps you’ve already read my “linking fundamentals” article. If not, you’ll probably want to review it now).

To recap my “take” on link building; the most important element of any successful campaign is to begin with a web site of exceptional quality and sufficient depth of material. If you don’t have this, you need to take a link building chill pill.

If you’ve got this in place, you’re ready to investigate strategies to build up your in-pointing links.

One of the most common methods to do this is to submit your site to various well known directories. Some good examples include…

  • The Yahoo Directory
  • DMOZ
  • Best Of The Web
  • JoeAnt
  • Gimpsy
  • Business.com
  • GoGuides
  • WowDirectory
  • Librarian’s Internet Index

… and many, many, MANY more. Of course, many of these services charge a fee to have your site listed in them (Yahoo!, of course, wants $299… per year – which puts it out of reach of most small business owners. And, other than the link it provides, I’m not sure it provides much “bang for the buck” in the means of referred traffic). Nevertheless, submitting to a handful of the better, smaller services will see you chewing through several hundred dollars very quickly. And, in many cases, you’ll need to resubmit your site in a year.

That’s why a listing service I stumbled upon whilst spending some time over at SearchEngineWatch.com looked so appealing. DirectoryMaximizer is a directory submission service that hand-submits your site to over 1200 “SEO friendly” directories (a complete list of directories is available on the DM web site) for an extremely reasonable price. Granted, many of these directories are new and don’t have much in the way of PageRank.

At the same time, your link is a permanent one, so it’s not a bid deal if your link sits for a while as the directory “matures.”

Initially, I thought it all looked a bit too good to be true, but I couldn’t find any real reason to believe the service wasn’t as credible as it claimed. So I figured… what the heck! My Real-Customer-Comments.com web site needs some in-pointing links, as does my girlfriend Marilyn’s SBI! site, Flowers-By-Marilyn.com.

So I signed up for Directory Maximizer’s service, and opted to have each site submitted to 100 directories per month for a year (you can have your site submitted to all the directories at once; not something I’d suggest, as it may raise a “red flag” with the SEs. You want your link building to appear natural).

Flowers-By-Marilyn.com was submitted at the end of February ’09, and Real-Customer-Comments.com was submitted at the beginning of March ’09.

Now, approaching the middle of July ’09, how do I feel about the Directory Maximizer service? What sort of results have I seen?

That’s a difficult question, especially when it pertains to the Real-Customer-Comments.com domain. Since I’ve started using DM with this site, I’ve also sent out a press release and built numerous new pages (each one gets a link from the accompanying review on UltimateFatBurner.com, so there’s plenty of link value there, too). So it’s impossible to attribute any benefits directly to the links obtained by the Directory Maximizer service.

Nevertheless, traffic has increased (approx 20%), and using Google’s Webmaster’s tools, I can confirm that many of the DM-submitted directories are contributing to this site’s in-pointing links. So using Directory Maximizer’s service has certainly not been detrimental.

Assessing DM’s value on the Flowers-By-Marilyn web site is perhaps a little easier, since Marilyn’s been busy and has added very little content to her site in the last few months. While traffic has remained consistent, we’re finally seeing a little shade of green on Google’s PageRank (PR) tool (we’ve attained the coveted PR rank of “1″). While I’m not convinced PR is all its cracked up to be, an increasing PR score is certainly not a bad thing.

All in all, the Directory Maximizer experience has been a good one. The interface is simple yet intuitive, and it’s a breeze to use. I can’t comment on the quality of the support because I haven’t needed to use it. It’s affordable too, which makes it worth the experiment; I think I pay something like $16 per month per site for the next batch of 100 submissions.

For webmasters of new sites, especially those desperate for some in-pointing links and mindful of a small budget, the Directory Maximizer service may be just the thing for you.

Related posts:

  1. Take A Link Building Chill Pill: Make Haste Slowly With Your Link Building Efforts
  2. Linking Fundamentals: Why Is Linking Important?