Once you have a new website online you would want to get incomming links and visitors. An easy but time consuming way is by submitting your website to directories. There are so many out there, most of them general and some niche directories like guiding-stars.com a specialty travel directory.

Not all directories notify you once they listed your site. And it would be extremely time consuming to visit all directories to check it out. This is where Directory Tracker can help. You sign up for a free account, enter your website address and let the tool work. It will show you which directories include your website.

It is also handy to find new directories to submit to as it displays additional information like page rank, category, price and which script the directory is using.

Only downside of this tool is the limited amount of directories supported in certain categories. There are currently just 281 directories listed with only 3 of them travel directories. Directory owners can easily add their directory to the list and hopefully it will grow fast and become an even more value tool.

Guiding-stars is a Specialty Travel Directory with submission guidelines clearly stating, at least I think it's clear, that only travel related websites have a chance to get a listing. A lot of people seem not to read or understand submission guidelines and submit all sorts of sites. That creates a lot of work on our side and leads to a refusal of the site submitted.

1. Tip: Read the guidelines when you submit to a directory and see if your site would fit. More on Directory submission from a directory owners point of view

When you submit your site to directories, you normally have to give them a valid email address.

Some directories use this email to let you confirm that your really want to be listed, other offer you updated and paid positions additionally to your free submission or send you a regular newsletter.

It depends on you if this newsletter is useful or not. Some directories use their newsletter to simply inform you about updates while others will try to sell all sorts of stuff to you. Related and unrelated to your directory submission. That all can create some extra emails in your inbox. But that is not really a problem. You know where it is coming from and you can easily unsubscribe.

A much bigger over the time for me are the listing of my email address with the directory listing. Nice that it’s so easy to contact the webmaster for link exchange you might think, but it is also very easy for link harvesters to grab your email address from there and sell it to a spammer. Suddenly you get lots of obscure emails, you inbox overflows with rubbish.

You will not be able to avoid that completely, but one solution is an extra email account just for directory submissions. Ideally you do not use one from your domain but grab a free email account with google mail or similar services.

Advantages:

• You will have your nice name@yourdomain.com email for your customer contacts and another one for directory submission.
• You don’t need to sort though heaps of rubbish every day to find emails from your customers.
• You only need to check this extra account from time to time to see if you need to send a confirmation email but you can mainly leave it alone.

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