Your site looks good. It contains useful content attractively and logically laid out. What else can you do to encourage visitors to your site?

Whatever you offer, there’s almost certainly some way to differentiate it from others. If that’s the case, niche directories can help give you an edge over the competition. These directories are especially useful because they can help you build theme-related links.

A niche directory is made up of links that specialize in some particular area, or point to sites that offer a product for a non-general audience – an audience that usually has more money to spend, and more incentive to spend it.

Advantages of niche directories

Search engines are trying to place more emphasis on relevant anchor text and the thematic context of links coming into your site.

That means links from sites that are related to yours may end up weighing in your favor when it comes to getting a higher placement in the SERPs.

It’s also important for human visitors. People who actively look for niche directories are highly targeted visitors. When they come to your site, they’re likely to be eager to read your reviews, sign up for your newsletter, join your forum, and check out your products or advertisements. They may even be more targeted than a visitor who comes straight from a Google search, since they chose your site from all the sites in that niche directory.

Whether your ideal visitor is a classic car aficionado looking for that hard-to-find 1932 Ford carburetor, or an immunologist looking for the latest breakthroughs in hay fever treatments, they have this in common: They are both people who are searching for specialized goods and services, they’re motivated to spend, and they usually don’t mind paying top dollar.

Finding Niche Directories
It takes an extra investment of time to locate a directory in your niche. The vast majority of web directories combine many niches under one general umbrella site.

One way to locate such directories is to go to a large meta-search engine, such as Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), and type in “[niche name] + search engine.” Unfortunately, you will have to wade through a lot of junk to find what you’re looking for. Another, but more tedious method, is to hunt for niche portals and blogs that contain links pages.

Image and Multimedia Directories

If your site happens to specialize in audio, video, film, podcasts, art, photography, or drawing, you may be able to take advantage of excellent traffic opportunities from some of these directories.

In general, to get into these directories your site needs to actually offer images, audios, or film clips. While these are often the perfect “viral” giveaway, many affiliates won’t go to the trouble of developing their own royalty-free art or multimedia clips.

However, for those that do, some well-trafficked and high visibility directories are willing to consider including you in their listings.