How To Guage A 'bad' Directory, Am I making a problem rather than solving one? Options

[lister]

I have been tasked by my employer to try and rank an education website - offering courses.

My approach has been to ensure that all the title tags are useful and informative to our audience - and - to sumbit the site to directories. I have a very long list of directories and am a little worried that I am unwillingly submitting the site to unsavoury directories....they might seem clean and nice and read by humans by how do I know - am I creating more problems than I am trying to solve?

Thanks!

[torka]

As long as you're not pointing a link back to these directories, links from them shouldn't hurt. They probably won't help, either, but they shouldn't hurt. The search engines know site owners don't have control over who chooses to link to them, so they generally don't penalize anybody for incoming links. Outgoing links, on the other hand, are under your control, and too many links to too many "bad neighborhoods" can indeed cause problems.

That said, if the total of your efforts so far consists of rewriting title tags and getting directory links, you need to understand while these are not necessarily unworthy pursuits, they are unlikely to achieve your ranking goals by themselves. Have you tried reading our Tips for Newbies to get some ideas for additional strategies and tactics that might be useful? If not, I strongly recommend it.

--Torka (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[cbp]

Put yourself in a search engines shoes and ask yourself --- which directory(s) would I like to use to help me rank sites in my search engine?

Would you use
1) Directories that exist for the self promotional and marketing purposes for webmasters.

or

2) Directories that exist to be useful resources on topic for the websurfer.

Very few directories fit into (2) and why waste you time on (1) if you would not use them if you were a search engine.

Spend your time submitting to (2)