Listing your website with online directories as part of SEO backlinking strategy ultimately helps with your website ranking.
By this, we mean that it helps your website to be found in the natural/organic rankings.
However, now the links from the directories are mostly “no follow”. This means that the browsers do not pick up the connection from the directory to your website- they have no link juice.
Should your SEO strategy include listing with directories? Well not if you are hoping for a “do follow” backlink. However, the directory may list your website in their own online listings, so you can get internet presence that way.
But yes, these listings will assist in building the authority of your website, which helps your SEO strategy.
Here are a few high ranking directories worthwhile listing your business:
www.opendi.co.uk
www.yelp.co.uk
www.scoot.co.uk
www.yalwa.co.uk
www.touchlocal.com
www.freeindex.co.uk
www.yell.com
www.business-directory-uk.co.uk
Backlinks have to be acquired through presenting good and unique content (not spun or copied) on your website. Although link farms (spammy backlinks) have definitely been the wrong way to go for years, some SEO’s and individuals still go that way, but at great risk of getting their website penalised (dropped in the rankings).
However, what about getting those all important “do follow” backlinks. Current SEO is not about creating backlinks for the sake of creating backlinks. The search engines, particularly Google have put a stop to the abuse of backlinks i.e. link farms selling backlinks (as above) which led to spammy linking strategies for the purpose of ‘cheating’ the system. The whole point of the backlinks is to show that your website has a vote of confidence – for the product or service it sells, or the information it presents on a topic.
Before we go on, here is more about the search engines:
The goal of Google is to be the best search engine, the most used search engine. Currently, over 90% of searches are done through Google. Whether a user uses a particular search engine will depend on their user experience. Do you remember the days when a keyword search would return 100’s of irrelevant websites with nothing to do with what you were looking for? That rarely happens now because the search engines have changed, developed and improved their algorithms. They had to do this because if a user continually could not find what they were looking for via a particular browser, the user would try a different one.
Thus given that Google wants to present the most relevant websites for the user, websites need optimising. Part of which is backlinking. So you may be wondering why, if you can no longer get ‘do follow” backlinks from directories, and you purchase backlinks at your own peril, how to do get them. Well, the way to get “do follow” backlinks is to create a website that continually adds useful, unique and relevant content that users like. Users will post links to your interesting content/products on their own site/blog/social media. This way the link has been created for the right reason and is then a true vote of confidence. This is otherwise known as quality backlinking.