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How Using Directories Can Get You More Targeted Website Traffic?

Posted on 16. Jul, 2009 by admin in Web Directories

You have a lot of options as far as meth­ods to drive traf­fic to your web­site is con­cerned; one method which has been in use for some time now is sub­mit­ting links of your site to Web direc­to­ries. A Web direc­tory (also known as a link direc­tory) is a direc­tory of the World Wide Web and is some­what sim­i­lar to the yel­low pages in the way that it lists web­sites (and links to them) by cat­e­gory. The idea of these sites is to present links to dif­fer­ent sites in an easy to nav­i­gate format. 

A web direc­tory is dif­fer­ent from a search engine in that their dis­play of links is not pulled up by key­words (the search terms you type into an engine), instead list­ing web­sites by cat­e­gory. The cat­e­gory a par­tic­u­lar web­site falls into depends on its con­tent as a whole instead of the con­tent of just one page or by key­words. This means that a web­site will only come up on one or two cat­e­gories. Web direc­to­ries allow site own­ers to sub­mit their links; from there, an edi­to­r­ial team decides on the appro­pri­ate cat­e­gory for the site. 

RSS direc­to­ries are some­what sim­i­lar to Web direc­to­ries, but have col­lec­tions of RSS feeds instead of links to websites. 

Direc­to­ries in General 

There are direc­to­ries which are very gen­eral, list­ing web­sites of all types in one place. There are also some niche direc­to­ries which list web pages only in cer­tain lan­guages or are tar­geted towards one area of interest. 

One pop­u­lar gen­eral Web direc­tory is the Open Direc­tory Project. This is one of the best known Web direc­to­ries; it is well liked for its large num­ber of cat­e­gories and large amount of list­ings in each. The ODP is also used by search engines and even other Web directories. 

Peo­ple often debate the use­ful­ness of Web direc­to­ries to web­sites; search engines use this infor­ma­tion (par­tic­u­larly ODP’s) with­out really incor­po­rat­ing any of the data. Many search engines test using clus­ter­ing, mak­ing them some­what less use­ful for site own­ers. A lot of work has gone into build­ing a sim­pler direc­tory devel­op­ment process, using scripts to auto­mate the link sub­mis­sion process or by using PHP. Social book­mark­ing soft­ware for the web has also brought new ideas to the process of cat­e­go­riza­tion, through tag­ging web­sites by con­tent (think about del.icio.us and other social book­mark­ing applications). 

Why Use Direc­to­ries For More Tar­geted Web­site Traffic? 

Let us sup­pose that a web­site receives only a small amount of traf­fic from a direc­tory as opposed to that com­ing in from search engines. How­ever, you do not nec­es­sar­ily need to sub­mit links to Web directories. 

Tar­geted web­site traf­fic is more often the result of a direc­tory search; some­one look­ing through direc­to­ries is likely to be look­ing for some­thing in par­tic­u­lar; some­thing which meets a spe­cific need. This tar­geted traf­fic is far more likely to be a prospec­tive cus­tomer than is some­one who just hap­pens upon your site accidentally. 

Search engines give a rank­ing to web­site or link direc­to­ries, espe­cially those which are niche-oriented. These niche direc­to­ries are more com­monly run by humans rather than by com­put­ers, mak­ing them a more reli­able source of infor­ma­tion – and the links within them more cred­i­ble, since they are human-evaluated. 

Related Posts:

• Which is Best: Arti­cle or Web Directory?
• Free High PR Directories
• How busi­ness web direc­to­ries can work for you
• Using Web Direc­to­ries for SEO
• Tips For Sub­mit­ting To A Web Directory

Tags: also-known, drive-traffic, one-method, options-as-far, some-time, Web Directories, your-site, your-website