We all know you need links to rank on search engines and links are hard to get. Compared to other options, directory submissions are straightforward and the likelihood of success is high.

But you’ve also probably read that directory submissions have little effect, or that in some cases they can actually be harmful.

So, should you do it? Is it worth it?

It Depends on How Many Links You Already Have

If your website is well established, has a ton of high quality links, and ranks fairly well already, you can probably skip the directories.

Remember that the value of a link is roughly proportional to how hard it is to get. Because directory links are relatively easy, they’re less valued by Google and other search engines than, say, a link from within a blog post on a high-profile blog.

So if you have a great buckling profile already, adding a few directory links is not likely to help you much. The possible exceptions are Yahoo.com and Business.com (see below).

By contrast, if your site is has limited backlinks, then you should probably submit to at least a handful of directories. These will help give you an initial web footprint.

It Depends on Which Directories You’re Considering

There are a lot of directories out there, ranging from great and extremely valuable, to positively harmful. When evaluating directories, you should have two things in mind: high quality and relevant.

A high quality directory is one that has high standards. Submissions are reviewed by real editors, and websites are rejected if they are low quality or non-relevant.

A relevant directory is one that has lots of high quality sites that are relevant to yours. Photography directories are good. Directories where you are lumped in with bingo, casinos, and iphones are generally not.

Two of the highest quality general directories are dir.yahoo.com and business.com. Both of these are paid directories. But if you are willing to invest in your SEO, most professional SEO will advise that you submit to these.

Apart from the big two above, the best directories to consider are photography-specific directories. Here are some good possibilities:

• Photolinks: www.photolinks.com
• Photographers Index: photographersindex.com
• The Photographer Directory: the-photographer-directory.com
• Photography & Photographers: www.photographyphotographers.com
• Photography Pros: www.photographypros.com
• Photographers.com: www.photographers.com
• Photoclicks: www.photoclicks.net
• Cool Photoblogs: www.coolphotoblogs.com
• DPhotoJournal: www.dphotojournal.com/photography-directory/ 
• Photography Sites: www.photographysites.com
• Photography Corner: www.photographycorner.com/directory
• Best Wedding Sites: www.bestweddingsites.com
• Wedding Photography Directory: www.weddingphotographydirectory.com
• Wedding Photo USA: www.weddingphotousa.com

It Depends on Whether You Can Get Relevant Anchor Text

This is a consideration that doesn’t occur to most people. “Anchor text” is the actual text used in the link back to your site. Usually, most sites use your business name as your anchor text. If you are John Smith Photography, then most directories will link to you using John Smith Photography. 

The important point here is that link anchor text matters, not just the link itself. If other websites link to you as “John Smith Photography” then Google assumes you should rank well for that phrase. If other sites link to you as a “Chicago wedding photographer,” then Google will assume you can rank for that phrase. In short, Google weighs anchor text almost as much as the quantity or quality of links to your site. 

So even if you have a strong link profile, if there are ways you can get high quality directory links that use your all or part of your desired keywords in the link anchor text, then you should submit to those directories. 

There’s a catch, of course. Generally, high quality directories don’t allow you to do play with keywords like this. They’ll automatically link to you with your business name. You can sometimes find ways around this, but they require creativity and diligence: finding the right directories, planning your business name around your keywords, using partial keywords, etc. 

For more, also see our Photographer Guide to Link Directory Submissions.

Have you submitted to directories? Do you think it helped your rankings? Let us know!

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• SEO Photography Website Review – 7 Point Checklist

With that kind of demand, lots of money can be made for ranking well on wedding photography phrases. Add to that the revenue for each new booking may be $3,000 or even $10,000 while portrait photographers might earn $500 or $1,000 per shoot. Thus wedding photographers have every reason to invest in SEO because demand is high and revenue will be high. 5 or 10 new bookings per year can change a wedding photography business entirely. The only difficulty to ranking well goes back to overwhelming competition for high demand phrases.

Expect to put forth a lot of time and effort writing quality content and gaining dozens of links back to your site. Before embarking on this journey, it can be helpful to know your chances of success. The following outlines how to measure your ability to rank for a particular phrase.

Google’s Link Game

Google’s game is links. Quick analogy. It’s easy to tell who is popular on Twitter or Facebook by the number of followers, or the quality of followers. With 5 million Twitter followers, or having the President as one of your followers, obviously makes you popular. Similarly, Google knows your website popularity by how many other sites link to you. Other factors help as well, like the age of the website and percentage click through within search results, but the easiest to understand and control is total number of unique links.

Here’s a test. If you’re searching for a wedding photographer, which site would you rather see, the one referenced 100 times from the top wedding websites or the one that launched last week with no link references? It’s clearly seen that users prefer to visit the popular website so search engines will rank those sites higher.

Check Your Website Popularity

You can quickly check your website popularity against the competition in two steps. First is to search a phrase of interest (like Ney York City wedding photographer). Next is to see how many links point to the top ranked sites. Example:

I select the number 5 ranked site for my test since it looks like an individual photographer site similar to mine (not a new site or directory). Paste that URL into a backlink checker like Online Utility.

One cool feature here is the ability to see every individual link pointing to your competitor. Hint: try and get links from the same sites!

Lots of Backlink Checker Tools Available

Get a more holistic view with a tool like Traffic Travis (PC Only) or one of my affiliates, SEM Rush. In Traffic Travis I choose SEO Analysis for a Keyword and type my phrase.

It shows me the #5 site has a PageRank (PR) of 3, age of 10 years, and has 73 backlinks (BL) to the URL shown and 73 backlinks (BLS) to the site as a whole. My quick litmus test tells me that the sites ranking well on this phrase have been around a long time (trusted by Google) and have a minimum of 70 links pointing to them.

Narrow Your Phrase to Something Reasonable

I’d definitely recommend that newer photographers put that phrase on the long term ranking plan, and perhaps target a more specific phrase with less competition. Check out my 10 SEO tools for photography keywords to narrow down a new key phrase.

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• Link Ideas for Photographers Building Search Rank

The first thing I do when looking at a potential new directory is investigate the site to see if it is in fact valuable enough for me to suggest to others. In this case it definitely was not, giving me the idea for this post: to expose my process of analyzing a directory so that you know what links to go after and which ones to pass on.

4 Examples of Bad Directory Practices

Some examples of bad directory practices follow. This is not a comprehensive list, but illustrates there are reasons to investigate links before you request/submit them.

• Link from a directory that may be blacklisted or has uses black hat techniques
• Directories that bury links on pages that Google doesn’t check
• Link that has been blocked from passing you link credit
• Automated submissions

First, Check for No Follow Attributes

The first thing I do before submitting to any directory is view the source of the website to make sure the links do not have rel=”nofollow” on them. If you see this attached to other website’s listings, then submitting your link is a waste of time because nofollow tells Google no to follow your link (does not help your search results).

Validate the Quality of the Directory

Back to that original tweet about a free link in the PR3 directory. It seemed too good to be true and I was right. What threw a red flag for me is that this site had a PR of 3 even though it only had a few links within it. So I used a backlink checker to see who was linking to the directory, because this can help me determine HOW it got to its PR3 ranking. With a free domain backlinks checker I immediately saw bad news. The directory had entirely backlinks from spam domains, many of which were foreign language, and 90% of which were from a single domain. These border on black hat techniques and sooner or later Google will penalize this site, and potentially any sites associated with it. You do not want to be linked from a site like this and have all of your link efforts be brought down by someone else’s bad practices.

Low PageRank (Buried) Directory Links

You really want to know one thing. If you add your link to directory X, will Google find that link, give you credit for it, and help your ranking slightly. Just having your link in a directory is not enough. If your link is on a deep page that Google never checks or Google has devalued then why would you want your link there?

PageRank (PR) is one factor to help assess how important Google might think a page is. You can check it using a free tool like PRChecker or the Google Toolbar. If the directory homepage has a PR of zero, then a link within this site carries little value to yours. Also take a look at some of the subpages. If some of the top level category pages of the directory (like the photographer’s section) have a PR of zero, then likewise it may not be worth the time. You can use PR as a lose guide to see if the directory has reasonable merit. Use your judgment here. The important thing to remember is that even though a directory may advertise a PageRank of 3, or even 6, that is probably for its homepage. But your link will not live forever on the homepage, it probably lives on a very low PR page and that is something to consider.

Ouch! Automated Services & Low Quality Links Hurt

I see lots of offers for automated directory submission. I have never, will never, and never suggest to take part in these. Take our above example… your site will likely get submitted to one or many of those directories. Not only does this open you to risk of being associated with spam sites, but it also creates many many worthless links back to your site. Google will analyze these bad links to your site and assume that your site is bad as well. You know from the Photographers SEO Book that it already does this with link text (Google learns what your site is about by reading the text of the links that point to you). It does the same with the quality of sites that link to you. A large volume of low quality links pointing to you can hurt your search results and should be avoided.

Is a Back Link Required?

If the directory requires a back link, you know it is not as reputable as others. Choose your reciprocal links with care, you only have so many room for links on your site before it can have a negative affect on your link equity. If a directory requires a back link, it can still be worth submitting to, but I start with one-way link directories that don’t require a link back. The exception to this rule is if the back link is required to validate that you own the site or blog (example: blogcatalog.com which is a great directory).

I have Never Paid for a Link

I have yet to pay for a link on this site or any other website I have managed or consulted for. You should not have to either. There are only a handful of paid links that are definitely valuable, dir.yahoo.com and business.com among them. Usually results can be achieved before needing to pay for those links. All other paid links should be seriously considered before purchase. And why pay for links when the Photographers SEO Book has a list of 50+ non-paid links that have been pre-tested by me for links quality, and many are specific to photographers?

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Top Link Building Activites for Photographers – Do These

Build Links Over Time

Remember that document I strongly suggested two seconds ago? Use that to plan out the links that you want ahead of time. In fact, Photographer’s SEO Book has a nice little starter list of links you should go for. By planning out a link strategy you can focus on critical links first, plan your keywords relative to the site where the link will exist, and most importantly you are telling Google that you are not “spammy”. Guess what will happen if you get 50 links in one day, and then no new links for the next month. You may rank high for one day, then disappear into oblivion, or you may even get blacklisted (probably not). The point is that search engines value sites more that have a consistent stream of activity, whether it be fresh content or links coming into the website.

Buy the Photographer’s SEO Book

I’m the author, so of course you should purchase this step-by-step guide for improving your search rank. If you are a beginner to SEO or are using a photography website template, this ebook will give you a background in search engine optimization, help you find the right key phrase to optimize for (extremely important before building links), gives you cut and paste meta data and splash page text.

Build Profiles in Photographer Communities

Do a search to find forums and communities for photography or your specialty and start a profile. Put your website in your profile and in your signature (remember to use quality anchor text, and different anchor text in each forum). Every time you participate in the community with a post – your name will link to your profile (which will link to your site) and your signature will link to your site. All of these links and you only set it up once. You will get great value from your new network at the same time.

Link from Photography Directories and Local Sites

Grab the low hanging fruit by submitting your site to free directories, local search sites, and business listings. Not only does it take on average less than 5 minutes to setup these profiles, but sometimes they appear at the top of search results and can outrank your existing site (like Google Local or Yelp). Be prepared to get contacted by some of these sites that want you to upgrade or buy advertising, so setup a unique email address for those listings. The amount that these listings help your search rank is not overwhelming, so take this into consideration and don’t spend huge chunks of time on this step.

Link from High Page Rank PAGES

Lots of people know about PageRank (PR), which is a Google indicator of how important a page is on a scale of 1-10 (you can see PR with Google Toolbar from toolbar.google.com). The point is that Google does not value all links equally and your task is to get links from pages that matter. A link to your site from New York Times (high page rank) is more valuable for your search optimization than a link from a friend’s blog. It is not worth any effort to be linked from a page that has zero PageRank. Typically this is because Google does not find the page valuable (and can sometimes devalue who it links to) and search engines rarely crawl those pages to even see the links and give your site credit. The problem I see most often is that photographers find a site with a high PageRank homepage, and think they are getting value from a link from deep inside this site. Remember it is the PAGE where your link will appear where you want to check the PageRank. It takes many links from PR 1 and 2 pages to start impacting your search rank, but only a few links from PR 5+ pages to see a noticeable change.

Link to Deep Pages

Search engines do not like controlled activity. An example of this is you going out and trying to control your rank by establishing a bunch of links to your homepage. In reality, the most popular sites will have real users linking to many different pages of the site, and not just the homepage. Impress Google by mimicing human nature and link to subpages of your site. Link to your photo galleries, link to your photography blog. When link building it is best to link to multiple pages of your site so that search engines do not interpret your new links as spam-like.

Vary the Anchor Text

Search engines look at the words in the hyperlink (called anchor text) to understand what the website will be about. It values these words more than the words that are on the site itself, because these words span many other websites and are less likely to be manipulated. It is very important to use highly searched keywords within the links that point to your website. For example my blog might have a link to my main website that says “San Diego Wedding Photographer” instead of “www.mydomain.com” because I want Google to know my site is about San Diego wedding photography. If you read the previous tip, you will understand that the normal process of linking would not produce the same anchor text in all of the links pointing to a site, so change your keywords slightly from link to link to “act natural.” This will also help you rank for similar keywords that users might be searching.

Be Cautious Of These Link Activities

Avoid Tons of Outbound Links

Google’s algorithm takes into account how many links come into a page versus how many link out from a page. It gets very complex. You can still have links to valuable content that lives outside of your site, but should not have a long list of run on links that are not valuable to your audience because it can slightly penalize you in search results. Choose your link partners wisely, and by all means avoid creating a page (or series of pages) that link off to a bunch of unrelated websites.

No Follow means No Value

Sites can put a little snippet of code into the HTML of a link tag called nofollow that tells a search engine not follow the link from this site. Basically saying – do not pass along link value from the site and do not help the destination site in search rank. Blogger comments, flickr forums, and wikipedia external links are examples that use nofollow tags to discourage link builders from commenting or posting materials for the purposes of SEO instead of adding valuable content. If you plan to request a link from a directory, partner, or want to add a comment with your link in it, view the source of the page to make sure there are not any instances of nofollow in the HTML code. Otherwise your link will not help you in your quest to improve rank.

Automatic Link Submission = SPAM

Avoid any offers that suggest you can get hundreds or thousands of links in a single submission. This will most certainly be seen by search as spam and get your site blacklisted from appearing in search results. I know it seems tempting, but you know it is too good to be true. Don’t jeopardize your brand.

Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are losing momentum quickly. An example is “you link to me and I will link to you.” I think there is some value with your core group of photography partners, especially if all the links are from homepages, but definitely don’t create a links page or request links to your site from anyone else’s links pages. In the best circumstance it just wastes your time, but in the long run it can be penalizing.

Paid Links

You do not need to pay for links, nor does paid link advertising help your organic search results. I’m not saying that Google Ad Sense is not valuable (I think it is in a lot of cases). I am saying you should not be paying for directory listings (the only ones even close to consideration are business.com, yahoo.com and joeant.com). You can still achieve a high rank without renting links from high PageRank pages. And you should definitely never pay into a program that promises tens or hundreds of links. Especially if you are beginner, try everything you can first and see what happends to your results before you begin investing, because you will learn a lot in the process that will save you dollars later.

For example, the Photographer’s SEO Book for $39 is worth the price just for telling you what key phrase to focus on. Because if you focus on the wrong phrase, all of your link building my be giving you credit for something that you can’t rank for, or that users are not searching for.

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Thousands of web directories exist that actually seek links to valuable websites like yours. These are like online yellow pages that index photographer and broader topic websites. The submission process to web directories is usually simple – just look for the link called Suggest URL, Submit Site, or Add Link. I suggest that you only spend your time submitting to free directories, and a link back to their site is okay if they require it. Tips:

* setup a unique email account for your directory submissions (expect to get a lot of email as a result of signing up)

* have a well keyword-rich site title and description ready since you will get asked for them

Free Links for Photographers

The first step in link building for your photographer web site is to create free online business profiles. Not only do some of these appear in map sites but often appear above the regular search results, putting your link at the top of the search page! You can also ask clients for positive user reviews on some of the business profile sites. Example business profile websites:

* Google Local

* Yahoo Local

Very seldom will I ever consider paying for a directory link. You can achieve quality rankings without ever paying for link submission, but if you have the budget for valuable back links, these are the only ones to consider:

* Yahoo (about $300 annual)

* Business.com (about $300 annual)

*JoeAnt ($40)

You can find many more websites that will link to you in the Photographer’s SEO Book, or by searching for “add link photographer”. Make sure to view the source of these websites to make sure they are not putting a nofollow tag in the links, rendering them worthless…

Beware the “No Follow” Link

The whole purpose of getting links to your site is to build your popularity in the eyes of search engines. It is important to know that websites can tell search engines to ignore a specific link by adding an extra tag in the link code, called “nofollow”. Why would a site do this? Example: the text on Wikipedia.org is completely controlled by the general public. Wikipedia wants users to post valuable content to its site, and not a bunch of self-promoting links. By adding nofollow tags it takes away the public’s desire to post links that have little value to readers.

Before you spend time trying to get a link from another website, do a quick check to make sure it is not using nofollow tags. When you are on a webpage (preferably the page where you want your link to appear), click with the right side of your mouse (Mac users hold Ctrl when you click) and then select View Source or View Page Source.

If you see more than a couple instances of nofollow, then a link from that webpage is worthless in helping your search rank and you don’t need to pursue a link from that site.

Bottom line: links to your photographer website are critical for a high search engine rank. Start with the low hanging fruit by getting links from online directories, then do link trades with partners. For tips on how search engines work, photography-related keywords, blogging for photographers, and google analytics – check out the Photographer’s SEO Book.

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