We all know that backlinks are an integral part of a site’s search engine optimization strategy.

The anchor text used in backlinks is key in obtaining high rankings for given keywords. Look at John Chow’s review scheme for the keyword “make money online”. Through offering backlinks for reviews that used that specific anchor text, he gathered thousands of backlinks that pushed him to #1 in Google for the keyword.

Most of us won’t get the same results, since we don’t have blogs that are as popular. But we can get backlinks just the same, many with our choice of anchor text. And one-way backlinks give us more “juice” in SEO terms than reciprocal links.

There are numerous free directories on the web that list web sites in appropriate categories to help people find what they want to find, and don’t require a reciprocal link. dmoz.org is the most well known of these free directories, but getting a backlink there often has a waiting period measured in years. And a single backlink isn’t as important as multiple backlinks, even if the single backlink is from a high page rank site (regular readers will remember my views on page rank…for those new to the blog, I consider page rank of linking sites to be less important than the quantity of backlinks, for search engine optimization purposes).

Submitting to directories is a time consuming process of filling out web forms and, for each directory, finding the most appropriate category for your website. Software for submitting to directories automatically does exist, but typical claims are about “blasting your link to thousands of directories”. For search engine optimization purposes, you don’t want your link blasted all at once to thousands of directories.

Search engines know what natural, organic link growth looks like. Links build over time. Search engines that see a thousand backlinks instantly appear will tend to penalize the site they point to in search engine rankings. Backlinks must appear gradually over time to mimic natural linking.

Directory Maximizer is a manual submission service. This means that your web site is submitted to directories by a real person, not an automated piece of software. This is helpful because the real people can adjust the category of your site to match the directory.

Another nice feature of Directory Maximizer is that you can submit to only as many directories as you want. If you tell them to submit to 25 directories, they’ll randomly pick 25 of their directories to submit to, and do it over the course of a few days. In a few weeks, you can choose to submit to another 25 (or 50, or whatever). You’re in control of when submissions are made, so you can mimic the appearance of natural linking over time.

Varying your anchor text and directory descriptions is also important, as search engines will recognize too heavy a use of one anchor text and description. Directory Maximizer allows you to give them five possible anchor text and description combinations, and a weighting to say how often each should be used. They’ll rotate among them for directory submissions.

Directory Maximizer has, currently, 683 directories they use for submissions. So you’ll only get a total of 683 backlinks using the service. I assume they’ll add new directories over time, but probably not in bulk. Each directory they use is chosen because it provides one-way links, and allows your choice of anchor text to be used.

Given that directory submission is a tedious, manual process, the fact that they charge only 14 cents per submission is a good deal. I’ve recently used the service for about 35 directory submissions for Online Opportunity, and everything went off exactly as advertised.

Some directories require confirmation of a submission, and those confirmations will come to your email address. Out of the 35 submissions they made for me, about a dozen required confirmation.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the service, and will continue to use it over time to build backlinks for the blog. To give it a try yourself, go to Directory Maximizer. Note that while they charge 14 cents per directory submission, they have a minimum $5 payment, which works out to about 35 directories.

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