It is now week 3 of the case study of Trip Boards and we have now passed 3,000 posts and have nearly 60 members. The search engine spiders have shown up from the Big 3 and we are beginning to get some pages indexed along with some search engine traffic. This case study update has to do with another critical step in a young forum’s early life, and that is building inbound links through directory submissions.
In our case, we have one of our volunteer Super Moderators that has offered to go and submit our site to directories. If you plan to do this yourself, I would set a goal to do between 5-10 directory submissions each day. You can find hundreds of free directories through Google or you can check out Digital Point’s Directories forum for hundreds more. If you have a budget in place for directory submissions, you can check this list of more than 200 paid directories to find the best fits for your new forum.
Building backlinks from reputable sites and directories is a must when starting out if you care at all about your long term SEO and rankings. While it can be tedious, don’t hesitate to delegate or simply pace yourself.
Thanks.That was very good advice.
I heard it is better to get a few links from popular, authoritative sites than submit to a bunch of directories. I think I read it on seobook. Obviously you disagree. Maybe the approach is different for new versus old sites? I tend to agree with your approach. It worked for me.