subject: Why Submit To Web Directories [print this page] If a directory is full of irrelevant links, then it is unlikely to be useful to either real users or search engines. Spammy-looking directories are likely to be penalized by the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Links from well recognized directories like DMOZ and the Yahoo provide especially potent "link juice" to a website.
Web directories allow for your sites to be categorically positioned on their database storage so that when a particular net user tries to locate a specific type of a site, it will bear no difficulty on the web directory to search for it and that goes same thru with the potential visitor. The web directory basically helps you and your site to attain a certain amount of popularity and exposure along with the other sites that have been submitted on the directory.
Well known search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo use very complicated methods to calculate who shows up on the top of results for a specific search term. These search engines, like many if not all others use very complicated software and algorithms to bring websites to their databases and to sort them accordingly. The ultimate goal of search engines is to give the person who is searching for a term a perfect match at the top of the results. If you want an analogy, Google would be perfect as a search engine if the searcher lands on the perfect match for his search term every time without having to press the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
When everyone starts doing that, the World Wide Web becomes a place full of directories and links with no real content. So, our big brother Google decided to flex its muscle by treating directory websites as "Link Farms" and banned them. If you stumble across any old directory websites with PR of 0, you know that these websites are the victims of Google slaughter. The implication is that your one way link in their website will not help your google ranking at all. Many webmasters who depended on their directory site for income cursed and sweared.
Usually typical submission guidelines are quite simple and within the common sense rules - your website must be legal, developed (no landing page or under construction), must not be related to racism, hate, illegal activities, etc. If you try to submit such website regardless of the guidelines, most likely your submission will be denied because most of web directories are human edited.
To get your site listed in as many directories as possible, you need to think about why they would want to list you. If you have a high quality site, chance is higher to get listed, but if your niche is popular, this might not always do the trick. Many directory owners find them selves with hundreds of submissions every day, it's hard to keep up. When faced with piles of sites to review, it's only natural to try to speed up the process. They don't have enough time to spend, to give every site a fair chance.
If a web directory becomes a random collection of links, it quickly loses value for visitors and submitters alike. With strict editorial control, the value goes up for everyone. There's no point in building a web directory that stays low in the value chain when you can spend the time and do it right. All submissions must be reviewed to ensure they meet quality guidelines and the actual description and title must be edited for accuracy and readability. Lastly, the correct category must be chosen so that the final piece of the puzzle is wrapped together in one fine package.
There are hundreds if not thousands of top end web directories, and part of SEO for a web site is too get listed in as many of them as possible. Sadly though this is not possible within a reasonable amount of time because each of the directories wants this and that from you. This is where web directories software comes in very handy. Using the best in software technology you can easily find that the software will guide you through the process without having to worry about logging into each site one at a time.
There are literally thousands of web directories on the World Wide Web. Many of them have an option for free submission and another for paid submission. Now the really attractive thing about directories is the fact that they tend to have respectably high Page Ranks (PR). Secondly in most cases, when a link pointing to your site is placed at a web directory it will tend to last forever, meaning that it will also drive traffic in the direction of your site for the same length of time.
