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There has been a lot of talk lately about directory submissions and whether they are worth it or a waste of time.

While some directories may be a waste of time, I find there are directories that are worth the effort.

In this article, I give you some tips on choosing the right directories for submission.

One of the most common questions I hear is, “Is a Yahoo! paid directory submission worth the annual $300 fee?” And, usually my response is yes. However, there can be a lot of factors influencing that decision.

For one, you want to be sure your listing is found in a higher level directory.  You don’t want it to be found too deep within the Yahoo! hierarchy.  It it’s too deep then it likely doesn’t get crawled as often and the link popularity your site will inherit will be less.

Second, you want to be sure that your site gets the most benefit out of the listing.  That means, ensuring that it is getting indexed by other engines, particularly Google.

That then leads to the question: “How do you determine what a good directory submission is?”

Here are some pointers:

PageRank - One of the easiest ways to check to see if a directory is worth submitting to is the Google toolbar PageRank.  While I wouldn’t recommend basing your decision entirely on this, it can be one of the factors that influence it.  Granted, the PageRank data is probably stale, but you can be pretty sure that its current display is a good indicator of the site’s worth, at least in Google.

And don’t just rely on the PageRank value for the home page.  Be sure to browse the site and watch the toolbar change.  Also, try and find the directory page where you think your site should appear and see if it has any PageRank value.  If there is no value (ie. The toolbar is white or grey) then I’d say it’s likely not worth it.

Google Cache -

If the page you’d like to submit to has a decent PageRank, check the cache date of the page.  If you have the Google toolbar this can easily be done by selecting the blue “i” icon and select “Cached Snapshot of Page.” The first line should tell you the last time Google crawled the page.  You’ll want to see a fairly recent crawl date as this will be a pretty good indicator of how often the page is crawled.

If the cache date is quite old this could indicate that Google doesn’t crawl that page very often for some reason (such as it’s too deep in the site, or doesn’t change often enough to warrant a regular refresh).  If that is the case, I’d bookmark the page and save it for later, but probably not submit to it too soon.  Do check back occasionally, though, just to see if the page has improved in the Google standings.

Alexa -

Also a tool that’s prone to manipulation is Alexa’s ranking system. But again, you are only using this as a gauge and not relying on the tool by itself.

If you grab the top level URL of the directory in question and go to Alexa.com and select the “Traffic Rankings” tab, you can check to see how much traffic this site gets.

Simply plug the URL of the directory into the search box and select the “Get Traffic Details” button.  When the results page is displayed telling you about the site, select the “Traffic Details” link to view data about the site.

What you’d like to see is the “reach” graph be at least consistent with no drop in reach, while the traffic rank chart below the graph should also be at least consistent but hopefully showing growth.

You should also take a look at the “rank” tab and perhaps compare the directory in question with another site, such as another directory, just to get a feel for how important it is.  Again, trends should be at least consistent or preferably increasing.

Finally, you want to review the “page views” graph to ensure that page views are also consistent over time.

Keep in mind that Alexa data is susceptive to manipulation, but as one of the measures to check it can be very helpful.

Using the engines to tie it all together - You’ll want to perform some searches on the major engines.  Look at the number of pages indexed, the number of incoming links and if you can, try and see how the directory ranks on the engines.  Take a look at the page meta tags (if it has them) and do some searches for those keywords to see if and where they rank.

Also, check the cache date of a few of the other site pages paying attention to top level pages such as the home page.  The cache date on the home page should be fairly recent, at least within the past few days, or I’d probably stay away from the directory.

Finally, if the directory has a search function, do a search for your competitors to see if they show up in the directory.  If not, find a site that is in the directory and then search its back links to see if the directory shows up highly.  If it does then it’s probably a good, safe directory to submit to.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.