Web Directory Submission – New Feature
I’m happy to announce a new feature in SheerSEO, web directory submission. So, I’ll start by explaining what web directories are all about. If you are an SEO veteran, you should probably skip this part.
Web directories are sites dedicated to organize lists of websites, organized into categories. A few years ago, this was how people used to find things on the web, with Yahoo being the most used web directory, but this is no longer the case, since we have good search engines, like google. Still, these web directories have the benefit of giving you a back link to your website, with a helpful text you determine. Don’t hold your breath till you get visitors from those directories, but you might get some link juice from them, and all you have to do, is to simply submit your site to them. For the very best directories, it is very hard to get accepted, like DMOZ, or you’ll need to pay some cash like with Yahoo web directory. But there are plenty of free web directories, that you can try being accepted to, and this is where this feature will come handy.
The Pain
If you ever tried submitting to those directories, you’ll probably found it very tedious. The problem is first to find directories that are free for submission, and don’t require anything like reciprocal link. Just finding such directories, that are really beneficial too, and have decent PageRank and reputation, will take some time. Then, when you try to submit your site to them, you’ll find that you need to fill the same details again and again. Those include details like the site owner, the email for confirmation, the site’s description, the relevant category, and so on. If you were to manually submit your site to 50 directories, that would probably consume a day of work at best.
The Solution
Our new directory submission features can save a lot of your work here. I’ll start showing the process using SheerSEO.
First, we need to fill the details, but in this case we do this just once, and SheerSEO will remember those details for you. We store those details in “submission profiles”, you’ll find that in the “directory submission” screen->”profiles” tab.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can create multiple profiles here, and later edit/delete them.
After we have at least one profile, we can move the next stage of selecting which directories to submit to, so let’s move to the “directory selection” tab.
As you can see above, you can chose here your directories by their Alexa rank and page rank. At the moment there are about 80 web directories available, but many more will be added in the future. You can select up to 10 directories to be submitted at once. You should also select your preferred profile for each submission. Once you’ve finished selecting, you can press the submit button at the bottom and this will lead you to the next (and final) step of the submission, which will happen in the “submission” tab.
So, here is how it should look like:
- web directory submission
Now, all that is left to do is fill in the captcha (if needed), select the category which best fits your site, and submit.
There are three features here, that will make you life easier:
- This is an AJAX interface, which means you can submit each directory, without having the screen refreshed. Only the status field will refresh after the submission, and will either tell you that the submission was successful, or let you know what caused the failure.
- If you can’t see the captcha image clearly, you can refresh the image with the link on the right side of the image. This is AJAX interface, so it will not refresh the entire screen, just the relevant image.
- One of most annoying things in direcotry submission, is selecting the category. There are usually hundreds of categories, and you certainly don’t want to spend much time on finding your relevant category. This is why we try to remember your choices, and those will be used in the next submissions you perform. But still, it will take about ten directory submissions, until we can be successful in guessing your selections. Until then, we just don’t have enough data to do good guessing.
A word for the SEO professionals
SheerSEO is built both for SEO professionals and website owners. SEO professionals usually have multiple websites to take care of, and use our master account feature. The master account allows to have a separate login for each domain and a master login to all domains. The master login is supposed to be used by the SEO pro. and the domain logins are supposed to be used by the clients. This feature will only be available to the master login by default, cause some SEO pros will not want to expose that to their clients. You can turn on this feature to the clients accounts in the master account admin screen (one of the tabs in the settings screen).
Summary
Hope you’ll find this feature useful. Remember it is still fresh and kind of betta, but I promise to keep improving it. It is a web directory semi automated service, which includes the following capabilities:
- Choosing desired web directories according to their Alexa rank and PageRank.
- Keeping common details like link URL, confirmation email and site description in submission profiles.
- Submitting multiple directories simultaneously.
- Semi automation. Most things are automated for you, but you are still the one to pick the captcha and the relevant category, so you are in control of the procedure and avoid being marked as spam.
- Category guessing. The categories selections are remembered by the system, and once there is enough data, SheerSEO will be able to guess you categories.
Leave a Comment
In the USA, only one directory really counts: DMOZ.
Does this tool help with DMOZ?
I’ll add DMOZ in the future.
DMOZ is probably the strongest, but there are many strong directories, and it might be that having your site in 50 medium size directories is stronger than having it just in DMOZ, and getting into DMOZ if difficult, Some times impossible.
I believe that some of the editors there are not objective in many cases. I heard a few stories of companies with interests, that plant their guys there. The reward is so high, that it can’t stay objective. So, it doesn’t make sense that Google still treats DMOZ as the most objective vote.
Hi,
Feel free to add our PR4 Directory http://www.moo-directory.com to your list.
Moo Admin
Really nice feature. Adding manually is really painful. Thanks.
Thank you for this interesting article, I’m looking for a long time for good directories that can attract much traffic and are able to improve the conversion rate on my site. I think a massive registration can improve the odds. I’m thinking to a special service that specializes in this
Quiet nice, but I think there are a lot of special services or tools for directories. I think you should concentrate your devoloper resources on topics like improoving the main seo tools. It would be nice for example if you offer more watchdogs and a better competitor analysis instead.
Thanks for this trick, It will really reduce our headache of Directory submission work.