Jason Bartholme’s SEO Blog

If one aspect of your link building is submitting your site to link directories, then you should try this to save tons of time. I take advantage of the bookmarking feature in Firefox 3. It takes your long list of potential directories and makes smaller, more manageable batches. Time is also saved because you can open the contents of those smaller batches with a single mouse click.

1. Find a list of directories

Well, you have to start somewhere. If you don’t already have a list; a quick Google search for web directory lists will give you some sites to get you a sizable list. You can check out RSSMage.com for a current list of RSS feed directories.

2. Format your list

No matter how you get the list, you want to format it so it is only one absolute URL per line. Have a look at the example.

3. Make Folders

• Now that you have a clean list of URLs, count the links and see how many you have. This is why it is a good idea to use Excel.
• Say your list has 230 links: divide that list by 20, that gives us 11.5 rounding up, that’s 12.
• Now, open Firefox: click Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks or Control-Shift-B. Select the “Bookmarks Toolbar” item on the left.
• Inside the area to the right, right-click and create one folder called Links.
• Inside that folder create 12 more folders named sequentially. Something like Links1, Links2… is fine just so you have the number on the folder.
• Be sure not to close the Bookmark Editor page, you’ll come right back to it.

4. Populate the Folders

• Here is the magic. Go into your list and select the first 20 URLs.
• Use Control-C to copy the URLs to the clipboard.
• Go into Firefox and select the first numbered folder. (Links1)You’ll see an empty folder.
• Hit Control-V to paste and the URLs will populate the empty folder. Very nice, aye?
• Now do this for the remainder of the URLs in your list, filling the rest of your folders.

5. Open the URLs

OK. So far we took a list of URLs, formatted them, and made bookmarks out of them. Now we can open a batch of them at once.

• It’s best to close all of your open tabs to eliminate extra open links.
• Right-click on Links1 folder and select “Open All in Tabs”. This will take all the links in the folder and open them in their own tab.
• Wait a bit while all the pages are opening or the browser might crash.

6. Submit the forms

Then, you can start at the first open tab and fill out the form. There is a variety of applications and Firefox add-ons to assist you with form filling, check out 3 Tools to Quickly Submit Your Sites to Web Directories. Once you get to the last open tab, right-click on that tab and select “Close Other Tabs”. This will obviously close all the tabs with the one remaining tab. Rinse and repeat with Links2, etc.

Conclusion

I prefer manual submissions over an automated process and this technique allows me to take a lot of time out of the process so I can do other things. You can have 50 links in a folder, or setup your folders to be particular niches. Whatever makes it easier. If you have other ways (aside from paying someone else) to reduce time in the manual submission process let me know in the comments.