Submit your yoga web site’s link to online yoga directories so that students can find your classes and services. The right מורת יוגה directories will not only send a trickle of traffic directly to your yoga web site, but also help your site show up higher in the search engines. Get your site onto page one of Google for yoga in your area, and would-be students will flock to your site.
Is your yoga web site lost in Google? Most yoga searchers won’t look past page one or two when searching for yoga class information, so it’s important to help your would-be students find your web site and yoga classes easily.
Just like in a brick-and-mortar yoga business, the most important factor for your yoga web site’s success is “location, location, location.” And in this case, the location you want is on Google’s first page of search results, using the most popular search terms for yoga in your area.
One of the easiest ways to claim your stake on this coveted search engine real estate is to submit your yoga site to various yoga directories online.
A directory is a site that lists links to web sites grouped by topic. There are general directories, which may have a yoga section in addition to other, unrelated topics, and then there are niche yoga directories, which only list yoga links. You may even find directories that only list links for a subset of yoga, such as Ashtanga Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, or Kripalu Yoga.
As a general rule, it’s a good idea to submit your yoga link to any directory that will bring you web traffic and/or help boost your site’s rank in search results pages.You want to earn as many links from other related sites as possible to your web site not only to get traffic from those sites, but more importantly, so that Google and the other search engines will consider your site an authority on the subject you and the other sites cover.
Authority web sites rank higher in search engine results pages. The higher your site ranks for yoga terms people actually search for, the more traffic you get. The more traffic, the more yoga students.
Some sites will ask you for a reciprocal link. Keep in mind that linking to another site is like casting a vote for it, and the content on that site is like an extension of your own site. Consider carefully who you link to. For instance, you may not want to link to the yoga studio down the street from you, they’re a competitor. And you don’t want to link to a site that holds no benefit for your yoga site visitors. They won’t appreciate it if you waste their time with useless links.
Another thing to look out for when exchanging links or paying listing fees is to make sure you get what’s called a “direct link” to your yoga site. Some yoga directories don’t actually link directly to you, but instead link to themselves then redirect the traffic to your site. An easy way to tell if this is happening is to put the cursor over a link in the directory to see what address shows in the bottom of the screen. If the url of the web site being linked to doesn’t show up, it’s a good sign this isn’t a direct link.
Another trick link directories employ is what’s a called a “nofollow” link. This looks like a direct link — when you mouse over a link, the actual web site’s url shows up. But the directory has inserted some code — either into the link itself, the meta tags in the header of the page, or in a file called robots.txt — to keep search engines from following the link.
What this does is set up a condition so that human visitors will see your link and can click to your site, but your web site won’t get the benefit of a “vote” from the directory. That means your yoga web site won’t get a bump in search engine results. The easiest way to detect “nofollow” links is to use the Firefox browser with an add-on called SearchStatus. SearchStatus will display “nofollow” links with a pink background.
Directories use these strategies so that they will maintain higher listings than the sites they link to. It’s fine to submit your site to these directories, but think twice about linking back to them from your own yoga site. If it’s a high-volume directory (like the online Yellow Pages, for instance) it might be worth it. Otherwise, a link back is not worth it, and neither is paying for a link, in most cases.
Though directory links and links from a list of links don’t count towards authority as much as a link surrounded by a few paragraphs of text (called a “contextual link”), general directories with yoga sections and niche yoga directories are a great place to start in building links to your yoga site. It’s easy, and it’s free.
