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Search engine optimization (SEO) consists of basically 2 fields: on-site SEO and off-site SEO. On site SEO means optimizing usage of your targeted keywords on your web pages and there are plenty of sources which describe that in much more details. In this article I will try to focus more on off-site SEO because this is more important, it is much harder and it requires much more innovation from webmasters. On-site optimizing basically means that you make sure you put your keywords in your title, description meta tag, in H1 tag, several times in H2 tag, that you have it if possible in your URL, in your ALT tag of your pictures and that you taking care that you dont over do it because search engine will recognize your site as spam and penalize it. So, as you can se, it is not a brain surgery. But for good ranking in search engines it is very important the quality and quantity of your backlinks. It means that the more backlinks you have and better their quality is, your site will rank better on SERPs (search engine ranking pages).

Having bigger amount of backlinks is understandable to everyone I think. But people are sometimes frustrated about what the good quality links means. This term requires another whole article but I will try to summarize it in a few sentences with a few obvious examples. The quality backlink is a link coming from a site within the same niche which doesnt have too many outgoing links and with plenty of unique and relevant content, not keyword stuffed. If this site has any outgoing links they should point to other good quality sites, not to some spam sites with 1 page, no content and hundreds of outgoing links. The best measurement tool of good quality sites is Google itself. For example if your targeted keyword is computer news, a backlink from some site with title adult movies is not a quality backlink even if the site is #1 in Google for its keywords. But if you can get a backlink from a site which occurs in Google SERPs for the keyword computer news in any position (of course closer to #1 is better) this is a very good quality backlink. Additionally if this site doesnt have too many outbound links it is even better. It is not necessary just to get links for sites ranking for computer news, you can try to get links from sites ranking for example for latest news, computer guides or similar. Those sites would be also relevant but obviously not as much as sites ranking for your exact keywords. On the other hand they are much better then some adult or gambling sites.

So now, when we know what quality backlinks are, we can do a little research how we can find potential sites for quality backlinks. There are number of ways, but in this article I will try to explain how to get them from directories. Well again, the best tool you can find is Google. You could go to Google and search for your keywords computer news and you will get a list of most relevant sites for that keyword. You could go through that list and check every site if it is a directory. I can tell you that this task would waste a lot of your time. You would find the most relevant directories but at too high cost (in your time). You can tune up a little bit your query and find much more relevant directories to submit your site to. Since all of directories have a submit page they usually have on all of their pages a link to submit page. This link has usually an anchor text like: add url, add site, submit url, submit site, etc. You can visit several of the most famous directories and write down every anchor text they use for their submit link. Then you go to Google and search for every submit anchor in combination with your keyword phrase and you will get hundreds of relevant directories to submit your site to and they will even be sorted by relevancy. Here are some sample queries you can use for your computer news site:

add url "computer news"
submit site "computer news"
submit url "computer news"
add site"computer news"
add link"computer news"
submit link"computer news"

These are just some of the possible combinations; you can find a lot more. In this way you will compile a huge list of directories relevant to your site, so it is just up to you to how many of them you will submit. Of course keep in mind that this is just one of the many different link building strategies. I will describe the others in my following articles and in the mean time keep your self busy by submitting to directories. :)