Directories of sites have been around near enough as long as the internet has.

Yahoo started life as a directory and still has one although it doesn’t promote it much nowadays. You can find it at here but personally I don’t think it’s worth the $299 annual fee.

The Open Directory is another directory. It’s free but the amount of time it takes to get accepted varies from soon-ish to never.

The best directories are hand edited. That means they visit your site and check it looks reasonably OK.

If it passes that test, they then either go with the title and description you’ve suggested or they edit one or both of those.

Your site then goes live on that directory and, when Google next crawls round, there’s at least a chance that it will spot the new link.

I tend to think of directories as a kind of “background radiation” type of link. They’re not overly important but they should still be in the mix of links you’ve got pointing to your site.

Directories fall into several different categories:

• The big, international, all encompassing directories such as Yahoo and Dmoz
• National directories – you’ll almost certainly have several for your country, just search for them
• Local & regional directories – covering a town, city or other geographic area
• Niche directories – usually focusing on a single topic

I’d suggest that you do a search for directories in your country and submit your site to each one.

Drill down to get the appropriate section, otherwise your submission may be rejected completely or, at best, moved into a different queue elsewhere.

Then write a non-salesy title and description. As though a journalist was writing it rather than an enthusiastic business owner.

Then submit and pretty much forget about it.

If there’s a fee charged, think carefully as to whether or not it’s worth paying.

I avoid any directories where I’m expected to give a reciprocal link – one pointing back to their site. Even if this means I have to wait longer for the submission to be approved.

Once you’ve sent your site to the national directories, drill down to regional and city directories and repeat the process.

Chances are that doing this will get you around 10 or 20 links which will drip in to Google over time.

If you’re in an industry that isn’t particularly competitive, you can probably stop there.

But if you need more links it’s worth paying someone else to submit them to the next level down – directories that aim to cover the world but are highly unlikely to show up anywhere in the search results.

They’re not spammy (because they have some kind of approval process) but they’re not places you’d be proud to talk about either.

They just exist and probably help your SEO.

For these kind of directories, I use a service called Directory Maximizer.

They’re cheap, efficient and they offer the option of spreading your submissions over the course of a year.

Your submissions will automatically be spread out over time because different directories have different amounts of time before you get approved. But the extra drip feed stops you getting an unexpected influx of links from the directories that almost automatically approve submissions.

So I think it’s a good “backstop” to do that.