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Driving qualified traffic using Directories
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by
Lee Traupel
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Driving qualified traffic using Directories

Some education is essential to enlighten you about this
form of interactive marketing. Directories aren't Search
Engines; they are web sites or information portals which
use analysts on staff to review submissions from
companies who want to be listed in their Directory.
Yahoo would be the penultimate example of this type of a
portal. But there are literally thousands of other sites
that group and list web sites based on their analysis
criteria. Here are some tips garnered from years of
providing these services to our clients.

1) How do you find Directories? I don't have an easy
solution for you, as we've spent years developing and
refining (ongoing) our own list of Directories. But,
look around on the Internet using Search Engines to find
popular sites that list resources in your vertical
market segment.

2) Directory listings are a great value, as they provide
a long-term listing, unlike Search Engine rankings which
are much more volatile. Once you achieve a listing you
are typically locked into a Directory's database for a
very long time.

3) Let's start with the twenty-ton gorilla in this
market, Yahoo! Spend time carefully reviewing their
various categories, then take the plunge and use their
"Business Express" service which costs just under $200.
(USD) to submit your site. Don't, I repeat don't submit
unless you have carefully analyzed where you belong in
their huge category selections; if you make a mistake
you only have one chance to get a new or revised
listing, as they aren't very forgiving of those who
don't do their homework before submitting.

4) Be patient when submitting to Directories, as most
are getting tens or hundreds of thousands of submissions
per day - it will take 30-90 days to actually get
listed. Keep an accurate record of sites you have posted
to and then check back 60-90 days later and resubmit if
necessary, but don't spam them, as this will not garner
any results.

5) Never submit a site unless it is ready for primetime,
with no broken links, under construction pages,
incomplete text, graphics that aren't loading properly,
etc. Indexers are very busy, once they see a site which
has problems they will click to the next entry on their
list and your hard work is to no avail.

6) Be prepared with the proper marketing materials for
this type of a campaign, including a working title for
your site which is 6-8 words, several groups of keywords
that are separated by commas and spaces of varying
lengths, approx 10-20 and 30-75 keywords, and a longer
description of your site which can be one to two
sentences.

7) Part of the required expertise involved in this
process is in the actual category selection - carefully
select which category or categories where you think your
site fits by looking at others in this category to
determine if you fit into this classification.

8) Be aware we are seeing a shift to fee-based
submissions to shortcut the process - Yahoo started the
trend over a year ago, now LookSmart and other top tier
Directories are starting to do the same. The tradeoff is
of course minimizing time to market - we recommend using
the commercial services to our clients.

9) Want to know if this process has actually done
anything for you? Check your log files or web site
analysis software and look at where your traffic is
coming from.

10) If you are getting significant traffic from a small
list of Directories you may want to go back to their web
site and pay for their premium listing services to drive
more traffic. These enhanced listings services typically
enable you to bold your listing or add graphical content
which enhances the textual description, usually only for
a few hundred dollars per year.

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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