Shoud I be submitting new blog enteries to any directories?

[Towelsrus]

We recently relaunched our blog.towelsrus.co.uk and this is personally a new venture for me

Are there site i should be telling we have new content (yet to publish any but close to). As it's a wordpress blog are there any plugins that do this automatically?

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Craig,

I have done this in the past and found that it used to work fairly well to build up links. Since the Penguin and Panda updates earlier this year, it has become significantly more risky.

I find that the best way to get your blog out there is through social means. Build up a good network within the likes of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc and engage regularly with your followers. This way, once you write a new blog post, you can then feed through a link to your following and this can be a good way of building some links.

Also, submitting your blog to social bookmarking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Inbound.org can be another way to get a bit of traffic and a few links coming your way. Probably the most important part of encouraging link building to your blog is actually preparing it to be shared. Look into Open Graph code (you can use a WordPress plugin that does this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-facebook-open-graph-protocol/) and ensure that your posts are social firendly. Also, have 'Like', 'Tweet', etc buttons on the page as this is proving to be a more and more significant factor toward search engine rankings.

Moving back to your original point, I submit our blog to Technorati and Blogwogo but that is it really. We have an RSS feed set up which can help as well. All in all though (and other can correct me if I'm wrong), I don't think that just submitting your blog to a load of directories will do much good.

Its all about the social!

Hope this helps

Matt.

[Towelsrus]

Thanks Matthew, that's a real help. Lots more to look at and as you say social is the way forwards. Its bookmarked here, we just need to set some time aside to get cracking with it.

[MatthewBarby]

No problem Craig.

Well, if you do need some help with your social, I can help you there.

Send me a private message if you want some more info on what we offer.

Matt.