Since Search Engine's are placing more and more emphasis on "link popularity" as part of their search engine ranking algorithms, webmasters should definately invest some time building quality backlinks to their site. There are a number of effective ways to build your link popularity and one of the most valuable is submitting your link details to niche web directories in your industry.

Benefits:

• Valuable one way links back to your site
• Targeted traffic to your website from the directory
• In most cases you choose the anchor text for your link
• Directories are human edited, being listed in a directory means your site has met some editorial standards for quality
• Cost effective advertising - most directories provide a 'free submit' option

1. Search on your Favorite Search Engine

Go to your favorite search engine and type general keywords related to your website into the search box combined with the word "directory" or "submit URL". The search engines love to put directories and information portals on the first page of their search results for general keywords making this technique a great first step in your link building campaign.

2. Use Google's Advanced Operators

To perform more targeted searches you can use Google's Advanced Search Operators; "allintitle:", "allinanchor:", and "allinurl:" commands. If you have a site about real estate some possible searches could include:

allintitle:real estate directory

allinurl:real estate directory

allintitle:submit url real estate

allintitle:free real estate directory

Please note that you must NOT put a space after the colon.

Use the "inurl:" or "intitle:" advanced operators to return results that contain the first word in the title or url of the website and any subsequent words in the body text of the document. Using our real estate example you might use these commands to perform the following search.

inurl:real estate submit url

Again, please note that you must NOT put a space after the colon.

This search would return results that contain "real" in the url of the page and "submit and/or url and/or estate" somewhere in the body of the webpage.

Alternatively you could perform this search:

inurl:real inurl:estate directory submit add url website site

This search would return results with "real estate" in the URL and any combination of the remaining words in the body of the web document.

Start with the allin commands to get the most targeted results and augment that with the inurl and intitle commands for a wider scope.

3. Use other directories to find directories

After you begin to submit your link details to directories in your industry you will find that many of them will also have a section devoted to listing other directories. This can be a great way to find directories that may not show up in your search engine searches.

4. Analyze your competitors links

Use the link:http://www.competitordomainname.com command in your favorite search engine to see who your competitor is linking to. Chances are they have submitted their site to a number of niche directories and other related websites. Your analysis will yield results you may have never thought of or would be unable to find using the "allin" or "in" Google searches.

Please note that at the time of writing Google does not give a full report of backlinks for a website so my suggestion is to use either Yahoo or MSN if you want to get reliable backlink counts.

Resources:

Google's Advanced Search Operators Explained

SEO Company Free Web Directory List - Almost 200 free web directories listed. List can be sorted by Alexa rank, Google PR, backlink count and more.

Best Web Directories List