Once you’ve managed to build your own website you are facing a huge dilemma: how to get your site indexed by search engines and how to get those one way links so valuable for SE.

One important way of getting one way links to your site is doing slow manual directory submissions.

You might ask why ‘slow’?

As anyone may know, a site is not immediately listed by a directory. It all depends on their human editors and on their availability to check all sites submitted to their directory. It may take up to 2-3 months for a directory to accept a site, as they’re all having a huge number of pending links each day.

Even if it takes quite a while for a directory to list a link, it is way better to spread this manual process over a few months period. This way the process will seem much more natural by search engines. No search engine will trust a large number of links of a new site being listed in a short time.

You may also ask why ‘directory submissions’ and why ‘manual’?

Directory submissions are still significant as major search engines like Yahoo and MSN still use directories in their search algorithms. In case you activate in a really competitive field, you should know that links listed in various directories help stabilizing your rankings when algorithm changes happen.

The ‘manual’ feature of this process is essential, as there is no software to pick the right category in each directory, fill-in the captcha and submit the site. Submission softwares having the same results as manual submissions are just an illusion of their creators.

Another way of getting one way links is doing manual article submissions. This process should be done in the same slow motion as directory submissions. The submission process should be spread over a longer period of time in order to get that natural aspect that search engines like a lot.

Except the fact that you get 2 links out of each listed article, the main advantage is right in front of your eyes (you, the one reading this) – there is a lot of people reading these articles.

There are a lot of debates regarding article submissions. Rumors say that listing the same article to more directories, that may be duplicate content and search engines don’t like that. However, nobody seems to have ‘felt’ such a penalty and no one knows for sure if that really exists.

One thing’s for sure - search engines will only return the article that is on the most ‘relevant’ site, the rest of all those articles you submitted get tossed into the duplicate content ‘filter’ - never to be seen by search engine users.

by Alex Harper