Submitting your site to every free website directory online

This post is a continual work in progress because I do not like the idea of sitting here for several days straight sorting through all of the online directories trying to dance to their individual criteria in order to get this post out in one sitting. So how this is going to work, is I am going to start submitting this blog to online directories, and every one of them will be entered here with some accompanying data.

As this grows, it will become an incredibly useful resource, so I certainly recommend bookmarking this article!

Directories Pending Submission

Directory	Comments
UK Business Directory - Add Free or Premium Link	Requires reciprocal, largely unpopulated directory, otherwise looks good.

Free directory submission can be a great way to generate many content relevant inbound link. It takes some work, but is worthwhile!

Shane

Social Networking Buttons in a JavaScript

Before I started marketing this blog at all, i put together a neat piece of JavaScript which anyone can use to place a series of social networking website buttons on their blog or website. You will be able to see these buttons above now.

What these buttons do, is allow anyone to submit anyone of the articles in this blog to Stumble Upon to be voted for, Digg to be Voted for, Del.icio.us as one of their bookmarks for all others to see, ...newsvine, reddit, comments, furl and smarking for similar reasons, and thus any visitor can freely choose to create a brand new inbound link straight back to me. And all I had to do was make the script once. Nice pay off isn't it?

Now of course people won't just press anyone of those buttons because they are there. They need to actually like the page, they need to actually think the page is worth sharing with others. There really needs to be value on the page they are reading, otherwise they are more likely to just close the window than press the button. The value of having the buttons there, is simply to remind them that voting is available, it would be appreciated, and it is easy because I have already provided a link for you!

The power of this aspect of marketing, is that it can create a positive feedback loop. Every time someone bookmarks you, it creates another inbound link. The more links, the more chance people have of finding you...the more people that find you, the more chance you have of those people voting and bookmarking you, thus each one adding an extra link every time it happens.

So I highly recommend using this code on your own pages:
Social Website Buttons JavaScript Code


Copy that code and paste it into your website wherever you want the buttons to appear, and it will automatically configure the submission button to submit the URL that it appears on, under the title that that page has.

Feel free to use this and edit it however you want (it really is a very simple script, if you understand HTML you should be able to pretty much understand this), no need to provide a backlink or anything, but of course if you really want to, you should know by now that I'd love one!

BTW, incase you are interested in this phenomenon, no these 8 social networks are NOT the only ones. This website as a brief summary of many more of them (170 to be precise, but I am sure there are more): http://www.populair.eu/


Now, we have a website, we have our keywords and our website descriptions selected, and we have the page set up so that every visitor can decide on their own that they would like to give you a free link. It is now time to start making our own backlinks so those people can find us!

Let this adventure begin!

Getting started - Picking keywords and phrases

In order to get started promoting this blog using the techniques outlined in it I first need to do some brainstorming. I need to think of the keywords I want this article to be recognized by and I need to think about an accurate description of the website so that people will be interested in coming here when they find one of my links or my search engine results.

So first, keywords. A handy tool is Google's Keyword Tool. That takes a bit of the brain work out of the brainstorming. It also gives me an idea of just how hard it is to promote specific phrases (that is, it indicates just how much competition there is for each keyword).

Keywords can be phrases, but for the purpose of this brainstorm I am just going to nominate single words. Once you hve the common words, then you can combine them in unique ways in each link you generate for your website. So I entered "Internet Marketing" into the keyword tool, and I used the 'Site Related Keywords' and here are some words that I like:

• internet
• marketing
• strategy
• advertising
• campaign
• research
• b2b
• strategies
  
• promotion
• articles
• website
• free
• guide
• tutorial
• tips
• ebook
• blog
• secrets
• seo
• beginner
• starting
• traffic
• visitors
• new
• increase
• generator
• search
• engine

And I could probably keep looking, but it is important to pick which words really represent your website. So I suggest picking 3 or 4 key phrases which combine the best words. I'm going to go with:

1. Internet Marketing Strategy for your new website
2. Tips to Increase your search engine results
3. Increase website traffic
4. Introductory Guide to basic website promotion
5. Get more blog visitors

Obviously I didn't use all of the words in the first list, and I even brought some new ones in. The idea of the first list is to give you a wide vocabulary to pick from. Expand the possibilities you have available to you. You can also use that vocabulary in your site description:

1. A simple to use guide for how to increase traffic to your new site or blog. Outlines where traffic comes from, and how you have control over that traffic. Necessary knowledge for any marketing campaign.
2. Unsure how to get more visitors to your site? This article will explain the basics of internet marketing and how you can easily and quickly increase your traffic without paying for advertising.
   
3. Read this tutorial to learn how to take your new website from a few hits each day to thousands of hits. Understand where traffic comes from, learn which aspects you can control, and then take control of your website promotion. By using the techniques outlined in this tutorial you are certain to increase your website traffic.

With these keyword phrases for the linking text selected, and these website descriptions written, it will be much easier to start submitting your website to website directories and link exchanges, which is where we will start.