Here is my list of directories I hand submit to when I have a new site. All 1410 of them
I orginally got the list from someone at VirtualWebData.com
If you get a little bit of puke rolled up into the back of your throat when you first open the list, it’s normal. Don’t panic. From my experience just take a big drink of your favorite beer and a few deep breaths. You’ll be fine.
Over the past year I’ve read a lot of articles and posts from people claiming that page rank is no longer important because information shows that it does not heavily affect ranking in the SERPS. This is a valid argument and it’s definitely true that people should not assume their site is going to rank well just because it has a high page rank. However I think this argument misses the point behind page rank.
I first heard of the term “link bait�? from Aaron Wall at SEO Book in this post when he mentioned it back in a post on his SEO blog back in August of 2005. He says in his post that if “you are in a field that can’t build links naturally create linkbait�?. What really is link bait? It’s something on your web site that causes someone to link to you. Aaron gives some examples in his post, but a classic example of link bait would be the Subservient Chicken web site by Burger King. So many people ended up talking about that web site that they linked to it—it currently enjoys about 29,300 links according to Yahoo!, and ranks number one on Google for the word chicken. By creating something on your web site that’s funny, controversial, informative, or creative, it will gain natural links—which is the key to top search engine rankings.
A few weeks back I bought a piece of software called PR Prowler created by TopNet Solutions
The idea behind the software is that you get to enter any search phrase and it will search for it on google, crawl every site, pull an email address (usually from the whois info), and send them an email which you write. This is used of course for what I call “link begging.” Hey link begging works if you do it right, and when you have a brand new site with no foot in the door, spending a little time on your knees can help tremendously. OK, so I took that a little too far.
***Site Rating: A- ***
I recently was invited to try out a new free article service at http://www.ArticleSender.com. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the world of article writing, there’s a lot your missing out on. More to come on that later.
ArticleSender.com submits your site to various article directories and Google/Yahoo groups. They claim they “drop your article in 30,000 webmaster faces.” Which is true to a degree since they are probably counting the number of members in each Google and Topica group, but it is a little misleading. I actually counted about 42 actual sites/groups it submits to.