Some paid directories are well worth submitting to if you need quality backlinks or want fast inclusion of your travel site into the major search engines like google, yahoo or MSN.

For me as a webmaster of several travel sites, the actual page rank in the travel category, not of the home page, matters. What good would a home page rank of 7 and a travel category page rank of 0 do my link building efforts. Especially if I look for fast inclusion into the search engines for a new site, it is important, that the page my link is on gets spidered by them often. And a page with page rank 0 might not even be included in the search results.

This list is ordered by page rank of the travel category. The homepage of these directories usually have even higher page rank. I will add new finding from time to time. So please check back from time to time or subscribe to our newsletter with all current information.

http://www.linkcabin.com/
Page Rank of Travel Category: 3
Featured links (5 additional links): $29.99 / One-time fee
Regular links (3 additional links): $4.99 / One-time fee

http://www.allthewebmasters.com
Page Rank of Travel Category: 4
Annual listing: $9.99
Litetime listing $19.95
They are part of a 15 Directories network. Listing for all 15 directories: $49.95
Discount for bulk submission available.

http://directory.v7n.com/
Page Rank of Travel Category: 4
One-time fee of $49.95

http://www.avivadirectory.com/
Page Rank of Travel Category: 5
Featured links: $74.95/year
Regular links: $49.95/year

http://botw.org/
Page Rank of Travel Category: 6
$69.95 / year
$199.95 one-time review fee

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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