One of the most effective ways of building your website's rank is through link popularity. This happens when other websites provide a link of your website on their web pages. Your website will therefore be accessible from these sites thereby giving you more visibility. The higher the number and quality of websites linking you to their pages, the higher your site will be ranked in the search engines.

With search engines increasingly becoming more critical of spam generated website traffic, it is very important to build your page rank naturally and organically. This means using only white hat tools to optimize traffic. One of the highly rated tools in this organic traffic generation is Directory Submission. This means having your website link posted on online directories that will in turn convert clicks to visitors on your website. There are numerous ways of doing this, with professional companies and SEO experts providing this service. Some of these directory submission tools are compared below:

Automated Directory Submission. This tool, as the name suggests, is a software directed way of submitting your link to the directories. It is a black hat listed tool and is therefore not a recommended way of building link popularity, with most directories blocking such tools. Directory submissions done automatically are considered spam and if detected will be flagged with the possibility of your site being blocked by search engines. It also faces the risk of posting links in the wrong categories in the directories rendering the submission less effective. If this link popularity tool has to be used, it should be used minimally and follow up checks should be done.

Manual link submission. This involves posting your website link manually without the use of any automation tool. A time consuming, labor intensive and expensive way of building your traffic, it is one of the most effective tools as it is easy to track efficiency of the links. It is also the top most directory submission white hat tool and you can be sure Search Engines will not flag you, as it is an organic way of building traffic. The flip side of this linking tool as mentioned is that it is labor intensity. It however reduces the chances of posting the link in the wrong category which might lead to the link being deleted by the directory owners. Manual link submission is the most recommended tool, the work involved notwithstanding.

In conclusion, link building through directory submission is one of the most effective SEO tools and if used correctly, it will bring highly rated organic traffic to your site. The question therefore is not if to use such a tool, but how to use it. As discussed, the two main ways are

Outsource to freelance professionals / SEO companies - The advantage in this is having people who are solely dedicated to this and therefore provide some level of guarantee in their experience.

Doing it yourself - as opposed to hiring a professional / SEO Company. This is a more cost effective way to do this with efficiency guaranteed as you will be able to track your links.