The number of inbound links that any site has has lng been touted as a highly important metric in promoting any website’s page rankings. As a consequence SEO firms (and we have been no different) have been diligently finding directories to which to add our clients’ sites in the quest for the Holy Grail of page 1 Google. This is an extremely time consuming activity and when all is said an done, does this manual addition to relevant directories actually make any difference?

The perceived wisdom is that 100 inbound links are the minimum required to have any beneficial effect. Our experience is that it takes an hour to submit to around a dozen directories – so do the math – a day and a half to submit to the minimum 100! Even with the most relevant of directories it could take 6 months for it to appear in the directory.

Now, of course, there are those directories which will give you immediate posting for a fee. At around $5 a throw, that becomes prohibitively expensive and there is absolutely no evidence that paying for the link is more effective than those which do not charge.

Let’s be controversial here. Does every site with great P/R in Google actully appear in Google Page 1? Well, no. And the converse is also true. Websites with great on page optimisation which can be found on Page 1, Google, don’t all have brilliant P/R either.

Smaller, niche sites may well be found reasonably easily on the search engines after some judicious searc engine optimisation but won’t necessarily have great P/R. In the end it is being found by prospective customers that is important, or is it?

This might seem obvious, but our experience is that very few websites are built with any marketing objective in mind. Even e-commerce sites where the ultimate objective is to sell goods online rarely have any marketing objectives. As for brochure websites which are the main stay of the web – how many are ever considered as part of the overall marketing mix or promote the company’s branding. All too few. Our first question to prospective clients is always – “what do you want the website to achieve?”. Invariably the answer is “more sales”. Fair enough answer, but as we probe further it is clear that few people treat their websites like their printed equivalent.

We then discuss their markets, their business strategy and then how to convert that into a web marketing strategy which will start to make their website more appealing to prospective customers and consequently attract more traffic, which we will hope to convert to enquiries and so on.

This cannot be done in a couple of days of keyword bashing and needs to be developed over weeks and months. It is, however, a whole lot better use of time than submitting to directories which may or may not ever display the site.

Think on!