In the current search engine marketing climate, it’s no secret that a large number of relevant (or semi relevant) external links pointing back to your website can help give you a leg up in organic search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly easy to secure a large enough number of relevant links, so creativity is a must if you plan to edge out your competitors in organic search rankings.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have been known to reward sites for certain types of backlinks one day and then “slap” the sites the next day, causing a significant drop in search engine rankings.  In order to ensure that your website’s traffic is not solely at the mercy of particular algorithm change, make sure you take time to plan out a link building strategy ahead of time that utilizes various link types.

How Is This Achieved?

To make sure your backlink profile has enough variation to weather search engine algorithm updates, one should keep a few things in mind:

1. Stay away from individuals or companies that offer to submit your site to several thousand website directories.Not only is directory submission rather pointless in my opinion (aside from about 50 solid directories), companies that offer these types of services rarely vary anchor text, page titles and descriptions which is essential to developing a natural looking backlink profile.
2. Be creative! One of the most important keys to successful link building (and online marketing in general) is creativity.  It pays to secure links from sites that aren’t linking out to hundreds of other sites.  Step outside the box and think of ways to get links from these authority sites and your rankings will thank you.
3. Always be ready to leave a link!Some of the best opportunities to leave a backlink come when you least expect (and most likely don’t actually have time to drop a link).  Keep a spreadsheet of potential places to drop a backlink and make sure to check it weekly so you don’t get behind.

Matt Cutts recently shared a video he made in response to a question he received from someone who asked if Google views directory submissions to paid directories as paid links (which generally results in penalties from the big G).

To get to the meat & potatoes of his response… he said that there are certain factors that differentiate a “paid link” from a legitimate directory link.  The main factors he mentioned are how much the directories charge to submit to them, whether submissions are reviewed resulting in poor quality sites being rejected and their policies on anchor text.

Matt stated in the past that the google webmaster guidelines included a statement about it being beneficial to submit your site to directories, and because of this the practice was abused.  Thousands of directories sprouted up offering to add your site to their PR6 directory for a certain cost which led to further abuse.

Due to this, Google has different criteria in place to measure the “value” of directories… so not all directories are treated equally.

The take away I got from this is certain directories like Yahoo! and Best Of The Web aren’t viewed as paid links and can still hold quite a bit of benefit in terms of SEO.  As far as submitting to “fly by night” directories or paying somebody on Digital Point $20 to submit your site to 2000 different directories… seems like it is a waste of time.

Watch The Video Below