Using a Web Directory to Boost Search Ranking and Traffic

Posted on 03. Jul, 2009 by admin in E-Marketing, Web Directories

Surely, Before the “invention” of search engines, web directories were king of the web. The fact that they don’t create much buzz these days is due to the dominance of search engines, but this really doesn’t mean that web directories are loosing their place.

First of all, what is a web directory? A web directory is a “website” that lists other websites according to topics or categories. Some web directories are very broad and has almost all topics and categories you can imagine.

Other web directories, on the other hand, are much smaller and contain fewer topics or categories. DMOZ is probably the biggest and most popular web directory on the internet. Almost any website can be part of it. Unlike DMOZ, which I will term a general directory, some directories are more specialized and are named following their specialty. For example, a director that lists only business websites can be called a Business Web Directory. A good example of such is the Jasmine directory.

Unlike search engines that use spiders to crawl the web and gather information about websites, web directories are human edited. There are two ways by which this is done. The directory editors can manually search the web for websites to include in the directory or put up a submission form where site owners can manually submit their sites to the directory. Some directories even offer both methods named above.

Some people still think that because there are many search engines and that Search engines are practically more advanced than web directories, submitting a website to a web directory is a waste of time. I don’t buy that.

Submitting your site to a good web directory is a guarantee for higher search engine ranking and more traffic. A SEO friendly web directory, for example is highly optimized for search engines and a link from such will definitely give your site more visibility.

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