For those of you who hate to write, you’re going to love today’s web traffic tip. Today we’re going to learn about submitting our sites to niche directories. This web traffic tip will help you in a couple ways.
1. Get some good quality links back to your site to help improve your search engine ranking.
2. Some direct traffic.
What is a niche directory?
A niche directory is a site that contains links to a bunch of different sites all related to the same niche or topic. You can find niche directories on just about any topic or niche. If you can’t find something specific to your niche you can go a little broader for inclusion. Say you have a site about ride on toys. You may not find a niche directory for ride on toys, but you may find one for toys, or kids, or parenting, or gifts, or moms. Those would probably all be relevant to your site.
How does a niche directory help me?
At the niche directory you will find a link that says “add my site” or something similar. This will allow you to provide them a link and some information about YOUR site to include in their directory. This helps you by giving you a link back to your site that not only people searching in the directory will find, but Google will find as well.
Many of these niche directories have decent page rank, which makes them a good link. However, even if the directory doesn’t have a great page rank, it’s still worth the link because it will be quite relevant.
How do I find these niche directories?
You’re in luck. There are entire sites listing different niche directories. Here are just a few:
Web Directories This site provides quite a few categories of niches. You will find quality listings of niche directories here.
Directory Critic: Plenty of great niches with directories.
While niche specific directories are great if your site is on a blog platform (blogger, wordpress .org/.com) you can also submit it to any/many blog directories. You can also Google your niche + directory to come up with more options.
Here are three that are must submits:
BlogCatalog: This is much more than just a blog directory, it’s an entire community. I get a bit of traffic from blogcatalog. You can acquire friends, and people can do blog reviews of your site. It’s an active community. Make sure you tag your entry with keywords so people can find it who are looking for information or to connect with people who are talking about what you’re talking about.
Spending a few minutes looking around for people in your niche is a good idea. You can add them as friends, or do a review of their blog, or just leave them a comment. Building those relationships is smart because it could lead to communication channels you can use later. 
Another cool thing about this site is a lot of people have the blogcatalog widget on their sidebar. If you stay logged into blogcatalog when you hit one of those blogs your picture will pop up in the widget giving you even more exposure. Not the BEST way to get traffic, but you don’t have to do anything so it’s a plus.
MyBlogLog: This site is very similar to blogcatalog. I personally haven’t had as much success with this site ~ but it’s still worth adding your site for the link. You can also add some friends in your niche ~ who knows, your niche might work better here.
Technorati: This is the like the end all be all directory of blogs. It’s a wise wise move to add your blog to technorati. It can be a little confusing adding your blog, but it’s worth it. You’ll have to create an account if you don’t have one. Then find the place to “add a blog”. You’ll have to veryify your blog, which includes adding a piece of code to your site (which you can later remove). They will give you pretty clear directions on how to do this. If you have questions feel free to ask in the comments section.
Those are three of the biggest “community” type of directories I highly recommend you take some time to add your site to all three. Here’s a post I found that will lead you to some other excellent blog directories.
What if I’m not doing a blog?
If you’re working on building lenses at Squidoo don’t fret. There’s directories for you too!!
Here’s some of the best lens directories (remember most of these are human edited so it may take a little time to get your lens accepted, and you can’t submit junk ~ not that you would be making junk ~ I’m just saying.)
SquidUtils Directory You’ll need to create an account at Squidutils to add your lenses ~ but squidutils has awesome tools for squidoo so it’s worth it!
Lensroll.com You’ll need to join to submit your lenses, but you can submit as many lenses as you want. This site you can also vote lenses up or down ~ the lenses with more votes show up higher on the page ~ so….
Squidom.com The Kingdom of Squidoo. Another directory you can submit your lenses to. This site also offers a bookmarklet you can drag and drop into your browser. When you’re on your lens you can just click the bookmarklet to submit the lens ~ very nice.
Isle of Squid One of the original squidoo directories. It’s been around for quite a while.
Squidoo Ink Pot This is a blog as well as a directory. Look for the “add a lens” tab in the navigation bar at the top.
That should at least get you started. There are squidoo directories popping up all the time ~ keep your eyes open, and google it once in a while to keep up to date on the new directories.
How am I ever going to do all this?
There are literally thousands of directories you can add your blog to. It can be completely overwhelming, I get it. I would suggest you find a good list of directories and just start. Don’t think you have to get it all done today. It will benefit you to do a few links a day. Make it part of your daily schedule to add your site to 3 to 5 directories each day.
If you’ve set a daily “link” goal for yourself, these will count toward that number as well. If you add your site to 5 directories on weekdays only you will have 1300 links to your site by the end of one year. That’s definitely worth a few minutes a day.
If you have questions feel free to ask them in the comment section and I’ll do my best to answer them. I had truly forgotten about this strategy ~ I’m going to add it to my list of daily activities as well.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c85708be-6897-4b13-81a1-e5d8e04ae59b)
Other Posts That Might Help:
[...] Web Traffic Tips: Niche Directories [...]