Free Link Directories
Without Exchange Links

As was touched upon in some other articles, a big part of optimization involves getting other "quality" sites to link to you so you can increase your "link popularity". This can be a tedious process, and it can be expensive, but it must be done. One of the best ways to fairly quickly get some of these "back links" at no cost is by submitting your site to free link directories. That is, web directories that will link to your site without charging a fee. You especially want to use free link directories without exchange links. These are directories that not only will link to you for free, but do not require you to link back to them. If a site requires linking back to it, that is "reciprocal linking" and you want to avoid that for the most part, as discussed in the search engines article.

Following is a list, in alphabetical order, of some free link directories without exchange links. Most of these also offer other options to list your site, such as reciprocal and paid listings. As of this writing these sites have a "Google PageRank" of 4, which means that for Google their own link popularity is somewhere in the middle range. (Check back later for more directories from the letter "d" on.)

A Free Directory
A Web Directory
A1 Directory
All Business Directory
Awesome Directory
Bee Directory
Black Dhalia
Blue Daffodil
Buzzle
Cache Directory
Cell-search
CherryDir

There are directories with higher PageRanks and which are thus considered to be of higher quality, but in most cases you have to pay for submitting to these sites. For an extensive list of directories that you can sort by PageRank, check out this database.

As you get other sites to link to you, how do you check on your site's own link popularity? One very easy way is to download the Google Toolbar which lists the PageRank of whatever Internet page you are on. It is available for Internet Explorer, but only for Windows computers. A better option is to download the Firefox web browser with the toolbar, which will work for both Windows and OS X (Apple) computers. The Firefox browser is a favorite among web developers, for many reasons, but chiefly because it features many extensions and plugins that let you do things like upload files and get details about a site's server. Click here to get the Firefox browser with Google Toolbar.

Another way to check get more detailed info about your site's link popularity is by going to Google and typing this command into the search box: .yourdomain. - site: www.yourdomain.com
If your domain name includes hyphens use this command instead:
"+www.yourdomain.+com" -site:yourdomain.com
For example, typing in .wedaloha. -site:www.wedaloha.com shows that this Hawaii wedding coordination site has around 12,000 sites that Google knows about that link to it.

A third way is to use the link popularity check tool from Marketleap.com. You enter your url and up to three comparison urls and a report is generated that contains a lot of useful information. Marketleap.com also has two other helpful SEO tools on the same page.

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