seo
posted in search engine optimization  on 11 October 2009
by Andrew Lang 
View by Categories | View By Latest

Pay-for-Review Directories Help Your Search Engine Rankings

Pay-for-review directories are a great way to increase your search engine rankings, since they are reviewed by humans, and if you fail the review, your site is not included. That sounds risky, but it's not if your site is not disreputable in any way. THAT may sound odd, but from a search engine's point of view, it comes across many spam websites, so some kind of filter is good for them to separate the chaff from the wheat. It's widely understood that Google trusts the following pay-for-review sites more than any others:-

Yahoo! Directory (sign up page) $299 per year
business.com (sign up page) $299 per year
BOTW.org (sign up page) $149.95 per year

The combination of fairly high cost with a stringent review process means spammers and less reputable sites are put off with even ATTEMPTING to be included in these directories (since they'll be throwing their money down the drain).

Yes they are expensive, but I've found the returns to be fantastic. If I had to recommend one directory in terms of getting much better search engine rankings, it would be the Yahoo! Directory, but I've also had very good returns from both BOTW (Best of The Web) and business.com.

My advice would be the following: try out BOTW.org first, it's the cheapest and it gives you a chance to evaluate an upturn in visitors based on less risk. Every 2 months they've run a discount voucher of up to 20%, so if you can wait til November, it's likely they'll effectively drop the price to $80 (normally it's a 20% discount voucher). After you see your (likely) increase in traffic, your confidence in these paid review directories will also increase, so take the plunge and go for a Yahoo! Directory review.

I can almost feel your reluctance to get a review based on the prices, but these are investment costs that will return you much great profits than the initial investment.
Share this article:


view my profile on Google+