Go Regional for SEO - Regional and Local Directories Offer a Great Opportunity
February 24, 2009 by jp · Leave a Comment
While a consensus is developing that Google is giving a little less love than they once did to directory links, there’s still room to make SEO progress by listing your site in the right places. That means not wasting as much energy on inner-page links on weak or new directories and instead focusing on regional and local directory options.
The search engines may not be that interested in the latest .info directory created by a webmaster looking for a few easy Adsense bucks, but they do still seem to have an affection for local and regional directories.
Why?
There are a few good reasons. First, these more localized directories offer a unique opportunity to the search engines to serve up better geo-targeted search results, which is becoming increasingly important to the engines.
Second, these directories tend to be human-edited–and those particular humans tend to be a little more selective than those who run other directory sites.
Third, regional and local directories, for the most part, aren’t overran by site submissions.
So, which directories should you submit your site to? Obviously, if you can find country-, state-, region-, city-, or even neighborhood-specific directories that meet your site’s specs, you can feel pretty good submitting there. Do the usual homework, though. If the directory appears to have limited, if nonexistent SEO potential you can skip it.
Many webmasters will undoubtedly consider cheating. If you find a great regional directory in terms of SEO value but you aren’t really located or targeting that region should you submit there? This is primarily an ethical question individuals will have to face alone. However, it worth mentioning that (a) if everyone behaved that way it would decrease the value of the directories and/or increase the workload for those maintaining them and (b) it’s likely that the overall value of the listing will mean less to you if you’re not really part of the area under consideration.
