Lyndon Antcliff at Cornwall SEO asked me to give my thoughts on directories vs social media in terms of traffic and page rank. So here are my thoughts and a little how to use both directories and social media to increase traffic, gain PR and make money online (sorry, had to use some keywords!).
So what about directories?
I think directories are great. They are an easy link and you can pay directory submitters to manually submit a link to 300 directories for under $20. If only 10% give you a link, that is 30 links for $20. $.66 per permanent link is only beatable by the following.
What about social media marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM) (Digg, Del.icio.us, etc) is not only THE way to create links for 2007, but it is also the best bang for your buck. SMM is the undisputed champion where directories are on their way out like Oscar De La Hoya should be.
So which is “better”? SMM.
Which is necessary? Both.
Directories are almost free links and shouldn’t be ignored. Even if Google only recognizes 10 of your 300 submissions, that is still only $2 per permanent link, which should be considered awesome.
I don’t think I need to talk about the benefits of one SMM article. Just look at this. 3500+ incoming links, PR5, 153 comments/trackbacks and all because of one article.
If I had to choose one way of marketing, I would definitely choose SMM. But thankfully I don’t have to choose one way, so I choose both!
this is spot on. Using both SMM and directories is great. while directories might be slower to send traffic and slower to show a link in google – they are a still a useful thing.
I have seen offers on Digital Point to have web sites submitted to scores of directories by Indian based companies. Some people have been pleased with these results while others seem disappointed. I am wondering if it is simply better to pick a few higher ranking directories and going with them instead?
Well, i have always found submitting my site on directories as waste of time. Apart the fact that most of directories will require reciprocal link, and it will take time for approving your link, on all cases (used for personal sites or clients sites) they were traffic worthless actually. Who would sit infront of a computer and digg into directory categories and click on the links untill he/she won’t find what is looking after, while can use search engines and find it in a second.
The PR value might be another story, a link is a link, can’t be worthless, especially if you get 300 link backs (considered or not by Google) they are still links.
While for SMM, i can say it is true, hell true, i did a test run with stumbleupon for one of my sites, it drove in around 700 uniques a day, for five days in a row, and then it started the crawl (the good thing is that only a small percentage became a returning visitor which is appreciated) and i would consider using it again.
I completely agree with the opinion that the directories submission is rather old-fashioned and find SMM very fast and convenient way. Unfortunately I see that there is already misuse of it. Do you think that time might come when SMM articles will be not of such importance?
Sure thing, SMM articles won’t be of such importance one day, when another successful strategy will be invented for sharing articles. So far SMM site’s have had great success, and thats why you see people building SMM site’s (some of big success like stumbleupon in this example, and other not).
The hard part or better to say the bad part of SMM is that you can’t really convert those visitors into customers or readers (in forums examples or blogs or article sites), the percentage of converting those visitors to your regular readers is really, and i mean really low (at least that’s how it was for me) but that percentage counts a lot especially for new born web sites.
Social media will be around for a long time…it is more interesting that traditional media (newspapers, CNN, etc).