Everyone that is a webmaster is looking for edge on their competitors on the search engines. Two of the more popular link building techniques is submitting your website to Web Directories and Article Directories. In this Article I will talk about the benefits and rules that should be applied when submitting to Web Directories and Article Directories.

The main benefit of submitting your website to Web Directories is when your site is accepted into a directory you will normally receive a backlink from that directory as long as they have no follow turned off. The more back links or also called one way incoming links you have to your site the higher you will be placed up in the search engines for your targeted keyword.

When submitting to web directories there are many things you need to review before creating your information to use when submitting to them. You will need an Anchor text, Description and keywords. There are other requirements but these are the only important ones. Your anchor text should include keywords that your website is targeting to be ranked for. But the anchor text should not include too many characters. You should have at least 5 variations of your anchor text and rotating them when you are submitting to directories. Your description won’t be too important for the search engines but more so for the editors that review your submission, make sure it does not sound like an advertisement. Instead give a detailed description of what your website is about in 150-450 characters, it’s also a good idea to have a few variations of your descriptions. Last is your keywords, there really aren’t too important when submitting to web directories, and all directories wont even have a box for your keywords. Simply put your 5 most important keywords for this field.

Like Web Directory Submissions, Article Submissions also have a great benefit to your website. When you submit your article to directories you normally can have up to 3 hyperlinks at the end of your article. And the good thing about Article Submissions is you can use deep-link URL’s in your article which are hard to gain backlinks for. Unlike Web Directory submissions, Article Directories normally can give your website an increase in traffic. The reason for this is an article is a much better informative resource then Web Directories.

When submitting your article to Article Directories there are usually a few guidelines that you have to follow. The first one is making sure that your article is not already listed in that directory. Once that is done check your article for any errors like grammar and spelling. Ensure that you have all fields in the submission form completely filled out; normally these would be the title, author name, email, author resource, keywords and category. If you submit your article to the wrong category, this will normally lead to a declination of the article, the same goes for a duplicate article.