Online directories offer many options when submitting your site to their directory. Most common are paid listings, reciprocal listings and free listings.

Paid listings are a waste of money and time. The only directories worth paying for are BOTW and the Yahoo directory. The traffic within the directories are minimal so there is really no need to spend money for a prominent placement within the thousands of directories available online. Directories are really only good for the one way links. Free listings are worth the effort, however, free listings can take many weeks or even months to show up in the directory. To get your listing reviewed and posted within the directory as quickly as possible, you should select to do a reciprocal listing.

With reciprocal listings, the directory will list your submission in a much quicker time, sometimes within hours, after you post a link to the directory from your site. So, I discovered a way to use a reciprocal links page to get those directory listings listed in as quick a time as possible.

When you select to reciprocate the directory link, you must first post the directories link on your website. The directory will immediately check to see if the link in on the selected page you submitted when you submit your listing. Once they find the link to their directory, your listing will be reviewed within a few weeks if not days. Listings without a reciprocal link can take months to be reviewed.

The benefit of this technique is getting the approved listing as fast as possible. The drawback is having all of those directories listed on your reciprocal links page. So, I cheat a little.

Once the directory has visited the website and approved my listing, I wait a couple of weeks and then delete the listing from my reciprocal links page. After they have checked for the reciprocal link on your site, 99% of the directories will never visit your site again. So, you expedite your listing and end up with a one way link from almost every directory you post to without taking months to get the link. Once the directories you have posted to have listed your site you can then go back and remove their listing from your links page. This keeps your links page manageable and in time all of the directories you have linked to will be removed.

Of course, you could always just leave the directory links in your links page, but why? The visitors to your website, if they actually do find your links page, are probably not there to visit online directories. More than likely, they are looking for websites that are very similar to yours.

Use online directories for what they were intended for, a source of one way contextual links.