In today’s times, discovering a worthwhile premium directory is not as simple as it as it was just a few years back.  While SEO pros have their own preferred list of useful web directories, the typical website owner optimizing one website could find it hard to decide which premium directory is worth the review fee.  In this article are some helpful tips to help webmasters decide where to spend their money.

Quite a few webmasters tend to believe that Page rank is a trustworthy metric of a paid directory.  This can be a completely false assumption.  With the proliferation of premium web directories has brought a new type of business owner attempting to make a buck from the link building needs of other webmasters.  There are thousands of paid directories running under a dropped domain or domain name with Page rank that has been obtained in auction.  In addition to this, there are web directory owners that are spoofing Page rank using a flaw that Google has yet to stop.  While Page rank can be a good indicator of the health of a directory, once must look beyond this basic metric and do some research.

The most important factor in figuring out whether submitting to a premium web directory is worth the expense is the page cache which your listing will be on.  If the page you are submitting to is not cached, then the quick benefit of your listing will not be noticed.  How can you find out whether or not the page is cached?  Using the site operator at Google, you simply type in “site:” without the quotes and input the complete URL to the specific page where your listing will appear.  Make certain you remove the http:// part of the URL otherwise the accuracy of your results will be greatly reduced.

Now that you know your listing will appear on a page that is cached and crawled by Google, you may also do some more research.  Copy the first sentence in a listing on the same webpage that your listing will appear on and return to Google and place it within quotes and do a search.  Does Google return other listings that match this search other then the page you want to be listed on?  If so, the editors at this paid directory may simply be approving everything that is submitted and paid for.  This is not ideal for the health of the web directory or for the SEO weight it will offer to your listing.

The age of a directory is important as well.  As an example, website directory is well over two years old.  This paid directory will produce more SEO benefits then a paid directory launched a year ago.  Directories that were started less then a year ago usually have not built up any trust with the search engines at all, unless they are really unique and produce very useful content.  In nearly all cases, young directories just don’t have much to offer.  However, newer directories that are destined to succeed and age do allow submitters the chance to get a permanent listing for life at a greatly reduced price.  With that in mind, don’t underestimate young paid directories simply because of their age.  As they grow, your lifetime listing will gain importance with the search engines.

When it boils down to premium web directory submissions, we all have a budget.  If we all had an open budget, we all could list in every paid directory that exists.  Since this is not possible, it is very important to do some investigating beforehand to be sure that your advertising budget is spent wisely.