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It used to be that as long as search engines found a link for your site, it would rank you, but as people started to abuse it, search engines started to clamp down. Fast forward a few years, and it’s very difficult to get rank at all without using some legitimate areas.
Article submissions, blogs and commenting, and directory services are some of the best ways to work with search engines and still retain the best ranking methods.

Why link farms were abused

Link farms were all about collecting as many links as possible and eventually these links, without context would get spammed – much like blog comments now get spammed. This spam would either overwhelm the sites, or the legitimate listings on the sites, creating a no win situation for smaller sites that were using link farms to share their links with legitimate sources were now swamped out of view.
Link farms were easy to abuse because the concept of ‘spam’ had only extended at that point to emails – which meant that when it started overwhelming the link farms, no one knew what to do. Guest books were also overwhelmed around this point. The net result of this was search engines started to look at links differently. The started to want and need context – which meant that link farms started to create and use categories. Soon, this too was overwhelmed with problems with spam.

Directory services – the differences

Directory services are strictly monitored services that list sites – they aren’t link farms at all because they collect specific links. There are also niche directories that are focussed on very specific areas of a certain niche – some are free, but most are now paid. Paid listing services are designed to ensure that you’re getting listings in a place that’s well visited, and has a solid level of traffic. Paid listing sites are also guaranteed spam free – as are lots of the best free sites. There are still directory services that are spam filled, but most of the time, these are easy to spot.
Directory services are almost like classified ads sometimes – they are designed to give people an idea of what your site is about before they visit – listed alongside other sites that are similar. As this is the case, you need to ensure your site and your descriptions are ready for the spotlight and have something new to offer.
In all cases, using a professional service to submit to directories will give you a leg up on many of your competitors – your SEO team will talk you through how to make your site shine and your submissions be approved.

Getting ready for submission

In many cases, your SEO services team will need to work with you to get your site ready for submissions – if they’ve worked with paid directory services in the past, they’ll know what the site acceptance criteria are – you may need to add more content, or clean up your content in some way before submitting. In most cases your site, if it’s already established will need little work.
Once they’ve done that, they’ll need to examine your site, choose keywords for your anchor texts and write up descriptions of your site. These will form the basis of your submissions to the directories, so you should make sure you’re entirely satisfied with them before releasing them and starting the submissions process.

Anchor text

SEO services will support you in finding the best link and anchor text – they should accurately reflect your site and its contents – and you should have several sets of anchor texts to rotate through. SEO services working with directory submissions will help you to understand this, or provide reports on what they’re doing. Anchor text should always contain at least one of your keywords if possible – and never your URL. If you’re submitting a blog, look at your categories – frequently they’ll be perfect for your needs – as a bonus, you can sometimes link direct to those categories – making the directory submissions hyper focussed.

Varying your descriptions

Directory services are designed around taking your link, your anchor text and a description. Your directory services should rotate and reuse one of several descriptions – this variety will stop your listing looking generic and spammy, and will allow you to rotate out your descriptions – giving them more chance to appear in search engines, and creating a fertile ground for the directory services to list you in.
Good SEO services will provide this as standard – and will give you the option of choosing the best descriptions they’ve created – you should have one description per four or five submissions as a best case scenario.
One way to vary descriptions is to think of all the different things you say when telling people about your site – what do you talk about – what are your passions, and are they included in the site? Or take some of your best articles, and ask your SEO team to summarise what they say – that way you’ll be basing your submissions on the very best of your content.

And then what?

SEO services will allow you to choose the amount of submissions you’ll like – their fees will then include the submission fees for paid sites. Over the next sets of days, you’ll find that most SEO sites will submit your site to these services separated out – so they don’t hit the sites all at once. Most paid sites have a review period, that may be outside the period of submissions agreed by your SEO team – don’t worry about this, they’re reviewing your site and will include you once they’ve made sure your site meets their criteria.
Listings will last forever or for several years on paid services – and can be removed and amended in most cases – free listing sites may have different rules, but in most cases you can log in and change your descriptions and links – you’ll need to ensure that you’ve been given the information from your SEO service.