It is a well known and established fact that high rankings on Google and other search engines can only be achieved if a website has both optimised web page content and good quality inbound links.

Having your website professionally optimised is a worthwhile investment and will ensure that your SEO efforts produce the best return for you. However securing good quality, one way links, to your web page content as always been the more difficult part of the overall search engine optimisation process.

A tried and trusted link building method for many Webmasters and a relatively easy way to start building one way links to your site is via online directories. But do website directory submissions still have value when it comes to your search engine rankings?

I recently came across a case study which evaluates if it is still possible to increase the position of your website in Google’s search results, by using this method.

A Webmaster tested three pages of a website that did not have any inbound links pointing to them. These three pages were created to provide valuable content to search engines.

The three pages were submitted to three high quality, paid directories (Yahoo, BestOfTheWeb and Joe Ant) together with a range of free online directories.

Approximately 45 days after the links went live, the web pages had achieved increased visibility on search engines. Visits and conversions also increased and the tracking statistics indicated that at least 50 percent of the results could be attributed to the website directory submissions.

The final results concluded that there was a major improvement in increased traffic to the site and an increase in monthly sales conversions of 45%.

What does this mean for your website?

Securing One Way Links from online directories is still a worthwhile exercise and should be a fundamental part of any search engine optimisation strategy. However in order to be successful you must also build one way links from a wide range of other sources. Google will give a higher reward to those sites that have a more natural link building profile.

Links secured from Website Directory Submissions are only one part of the link building jigsaw. In order to out perform your competitors, you should also secure links from websites that are related to your content, such as blogs and social media sites like Facebook, Digg etc.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 10:40 and is filed under Link Popularity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.