Well since you guys liked the previous installment I will add a few more tips for your consideration....

Choosing a Bid Directory

When selecting among bid directories there are many factors that you should consider.

Why do I want this listing?

Bidders have a variety of reasons for wanting to be listed in a directory. They might want traffic, page rank, trust, branding, anchor text, indexing or all of the above.

Of course webmasters are going to think I want all of the above! But in reality it depends on the industry sector, marketing phase and budget.

By examining your motivations you can quickly narrow your choices and correctly allocate your budget or bid account.

1. Newly Launched Sites - Day 1

Brand new sites generally concern themselves with getting search engines to recognize their sites and provide keywords for searches (link anchor text). However marketing budgets are often limited while sites are still being refined.

Home page links of directories are usually crawled more frequently by search engines as opposed to the deeper pages. This is because most inbound links are pointing to the main page of a site.

STRATEGY: Get inexpensive home page links on several NEW bid directories. Sites are often indexed within hours ... assuming you follow the guidelines published by the search engines.


2. Established Sites Day 2 - 365

Where search engine marketing is the basis for traffic in your industry you want to be associated with trusted sites and relate your products to the company (branding).

Research has proven that consumers need to see advertisements several times before it is remembered. That means you are going to need dozens of ads spread over a large number of sites associated with your product category.

Now comes the work --- Search for directories that have trusted listings in your area of business or for the keywords you are targeting. Try searching using ---> "key phrase" +directory in your favorite search engine.

Any directory returned in the results is likely trusted by that search engine.

STRATEGY: If a specific page within a category is returned then try to bid onto that page. Otherwise find the most relevant category related to your business and bid into that category.

3. Leading Sites - 1+ Years

If all has gone well with your marketing campaign then your site should be near the top of search results (SERPs). However your traffic is leveling off or fluctuating wildly from day to day.

Now is the time to pull out all the stops. Search engines DO NOT control all traffic on the Internet. In fact many users complain that they can never find what they want (wrong phrase searched) or they don't get relevant sites (non-specific searches). As a result they resort to link hopping until they stumble onto a relevant site (or a directory).

For this type of traffic you want to be on the home page of high to very high traffic directories. These directories are a little harder to find and it will take some effort on your part. Look for directories that have a lot of quality backlinks. Try searching using ---> LINKDOMAIN:www.domain.com in Yahoo (Google's link command does not work).

Next you need to determine if the links have quality or are they simply exaggerated filler links. Remember link farms also count as a link even if they have no real value.

There is no 100% sure way of determining how much traffic a site receives unless you have access to the server logs.

So we have to estimate likely amounts of traffic.

You could scan the list returned by Yahoo above and determine if the links are inflated using site-wides, forum sigs or deep page links. Don't get me wrong these links provide some traffic and have their place, but home page and industry specific directories often provide more visitors.

Another way is to look at the Alexa ranking to compare relative ranking. Again this is not perfect but it can be a useful metric for sorting candidate directories when compared with the number of links.

STRATEGY: Buy a few home page links on a FEW high traffic, high quality directories. These will not be cheap but will likely provide thousands of page views daily.

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MrktCity Directory
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