These are two most important directories you could get your site listed in. A few others to consider are:

• www.canlinks.net
• www.galaxy.com
• www.goguides.org
• www.goongee.com
• www.jayde.com
• www.joeant.com
• www.linkopedia.com
• www.pharos-search.com
• www.searchmonster.org
• www.skaffe.com
• www.websavvy.cc
• www.zeal.com

The list goes on and on, these are just a few I personally recommend, if you know of others worth mentioning please leave a comment here and let others know.

By putting as much as effort towards directory submissions as you do getting listed in major search engines, you can secure some healthy qualified traffic that could end up benefiting you and your visitors just as much as search engines.

This article was written by Wil Rushmer, founder of www.seohype.com - A resource for internet marketing and website promotion tutorials, including search engine optimisation techniques.

This articles may be reprinted so long as all links remain active

Using Images For Primary Navigation Links

Many webmasters like to use fancy looking navigation links but, in doing so, they fail to establish a theme for their sites. For instance, using a graphical link back to your home page does not tell search engine spiders what that link is about unless spider actually visits that page. If you use optimized ALT text on that graphical home page link, then that would be a step in right direction. But to maximize effect and clearly define theme of your web site, you need to use a text link that has your primary keyword or phrase within link text. This is called Link Reputation.

Home, Site Map and Contact Page Links

The Home, Site Map and Contact pages are your site's primary pages and should be your SEO strategy top priority. It is essential that these pages be spidered and exposed to your site visitors. To ensure that they are spidered, place links to them near top of your source code on every page of your web site. Your home page is, of course, main entrance to your web site so you want that to be focal point in search engines. Your site map page should (if properly optimized) have links to all of your sub pages and use primary keywords belonging to each sub page within link text pointing to those sub pages. Your contact page is just as important because it's used by visitors who have questions or who wish to order products and services.

Redirected Pages

When a web page has outlived its usefulness, webmasters will, on occasion, redirect visitors hitting that page to another page. Search engine spiders, however, take a dim view of page redirects. If you change content of your site and find that you have no further use for a page, do not place a redirect on that page. Instead, remove outdated content and replace it with something relevant. Include a text link to your home page or to a new replacement page. When you remove a page or place a redirect on an outdated page, you're cheating yourself out of better rankings and search engine traffic. Moreover, using page redirects can result in removal of your site listing in search engine databases with a consequent loss of revenue.

Excessively Small Type Font Sizes

Text in a font smaller than font size 2 is normally reserved for copyright information and legal jargon often seen at bottom of web pages. Use font size 2, or greater, for majority of text on your page. Font size is a major factor in SEO strategy because font size used defines relevancy a search engine spider assigns to content it finds on your page. An example of this would be text within heading tags (H1 through to H6). Text surrounded with H1 tags has a higher relevancy placed on it than text surrounded with H6 tags. Visit w3.org website for a better understanding of how on-page text is viewed by search engine spiders with regard to importance and relevancy. Search engine spiders tend to follow W3 HTML standard.

Hidden Text, Door Way Pages and Other Tricks

Nowadays search engines are pretty smart and trying to trick them is not a wise course of action. Take some time to stop and examine your approach before proceeding with your SEO strategy. The rule of thumb is that if it looks like spam or could be perceived as spam by search engines, then it probably is spam. The last thing you need is for a competitor to report unethical SEO tactics to search engines. Such tactics could result in a loss of existing site listings as well as a ban on future submissions. So, to ensure longevity of your online business, stay away from any technique that looks unethical.

Using HTML Frames

In short, don't. Frames are not very search engine friendly because search engines cannot read a framed source document that tells your browser to load more than one page in your browser window at same time. Thus, achieving a high PageRank on your home page is difficult. Frames also make it hard for search engine spiders to find all of your sub pages.

Non-Spider-Friendly URL's

If URL's for your web site contain characters such as &, $, =, %, etc., that is they are dynamic in nature, then search engine spiders may not be able to read them. And, if they can't be read, then search engine spiders won't be able to follow them to index your pages. However, there are solutions available to fix this problem. For example, webmasters who have sites hosted on servers with Unix operating systems can use Apache mod_rewrite to rewrite URL's that contain a session ID, or other nasty characters, into search engine spider friendly URL's.

SEO, of course, is not just limited to 13 areas covered in this article, but if you apply SEO strategies outlined in these 13 areas to your web site, you will find that your site rankings and traffic improve dramatically.