On the latest years, On-Page SEO have been more and more important. This is because the search engines can't really judge themself how interesting your content is, but counting how many links that is pointing to your site make it easier for them to judge how popular your site and your content is. So therefore, linkbuilding is the most effective SEO strategy today.
On a side note, sites that focus too much on On-page SEO can easily get banned in google. This is because bots like google bot can raise a spam alarm on your site, if your site is too much targetted for a couple keywords. Therefore, try to make your sites, in this case a shop, to look like it was build without much SEO influense.
So, what is the best way to get inbound links to your shop then? Well, there are three main factors that a shop-owner should follow. Those are time, entertaining, effectivity and simplicity. Wait a minute.. why did I include entertaining? Well simply because the more entertaining they are, the more fun you will have, the more you will grow as a person and the more you can keep on with your strategy without getting bored.
I will now judge the strategy of getting links from directories and give it a score based on how good it is on saving time, how entertaining it is, how effective they are and how simple it is. The higher score, the better it is.
Directory submissions
A good way to get your site indexed for the first time. Not very effective PR wise.
Tip1: Go for new directories. Many of them will become paid after a few weeks and then you basically have a payed link that can be listed on a page that has a PR between 1 and 3.
Tip2: Default directories that looks like everything else sucks by default. One link from a specialised directory such as http://www.findproducts.org might give you a lot more than 200 default directories would do.
Tip3: Go for RSS directories, they are easy to link in and they will give you more link value back then regular directories since the link can be spread to every single section on your site.
Time: 2 -
Reason: Directory submitting takes time. Submitting a site into 300 directories can take a whole day.
Entertaining: 1 -
Reason: A very static job. Although, some different looking directories might cheer you up
Effectivity: 3 - Reason: Well, it's effective when it's done in quality directories but it's cheaper if you do it in free directories that turns to paid and become a quality hard-to-get-into directory. But try to register to as many ASAP. Who knows which ones will be quality and which not.
Simplicity: 4 - Reason: You just need to input a few sitepreferences and then you are done. Atleast in the majority of the directories. Some may require you to login, and that might be the ones it's worth to really register in(considering most other webmasters would simply close the tab and go for another directory).
I am Brett Hull. I am a programmer and have made a Product Directory Script for people that would like to start their own shopping directory.
