Regardless of the type of site you have, whether it is purely informational or a full blown e-commerce site, it is always worth budgeting for subscription fees to the strong directories. The sites where you have to pay a fee to be able to list them have that fee for a reason; they are widely used, and often have an in-house marketing team working full time to manage the site. This means they can filter any spam out, and can take the time to review each site that wants to be listed to filter out the poor quality ones, and ensure their site only lists credible, desirable sites. Also, your site will be reviewed as to its suitability and accepted into the directory listings quicker than with non subscription sites, as they will often have large backlogs of sites waiting for approval. As a result, they run the risk of becoming a link farm – something search engines such as Google pay no attention to, and are, in actual fact, illegal. Possibly the biggest advantage when using a paid directory is that they attract the heaviest traffic – they themselves spend money on ensuring they are high up in the search engine rankings, and are popular sites to visit themselves. This is then transferred to the sites they are listing, as customers are more likely to trust their content.

By working through the top 100 or so directories and subscribing to each one can set you back around a couple of thousands pounds, but you mustn’t forget that this is a one off cost, that will ensure your listing among the top sites for life. The security and guarantee of traffic these sites have makes them a good option to take when looking at ways to promote your business online.

As we already know, having a high number of back links featured on other sites is the bets way to ensure search engines are aware of your site and to boost your site up in the rankings. Therefore registering with a site such Stongestlinks.com is a sensible way to manage your links, and to ensure all the links you have are relevant. Browsers and visitors to sites get very frustrated if the links they click on do not direct them to where they expected it to, so it is important to make sure you only have back links on sites relevant to your area of business.

Probably the most important thing to remember when budgeting for online marketing is that not all of the money should be spent in one area, such as article directories subscription fees, but should be spread out to achieve an even cover – writing and submitting articles, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation on the actual site by experienced web designers, etc. These should all be included in the marketing mix, because not all search engines use the same methods when ranking pages, and above all the internet is still a relatively new world, and trends are liable to change.
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