Increasing Your Traffic with Web Directories

Are web directories worth the effort anymore? Why spend the time (and in some cases money) submitting your website to a directory if it seems like nobody uses them anymore? Well, web directories are more useful to attract visitors to your site than you might think. This article gives you the surprising reason why, describes a couple of the biggest web directories, and helps you make the most of this resource.
Web directories have been around for some time now. In fact this is how the ever growing Yahoo! began life on the Internet, as one the biggest and best organized web directories at the time (and even now too). Web directories were the de facto method that many people used to find the information and websites they were looking for before the search engines because so big, powerful, and popular, and while the directories have been a lot less popular in comparison to fully fledged search engines in recent years, they are still the next best thing to searching and can have an important effect on increasing your search engine results pages (SERPs) ranking. While some webmasters may question the relevancy of directory listings in today's web, suggesting that they receive very little direct traffic in the form of surfers coming from directories, you have to remember that the web is used by crawlers and indexing bots too, and they love well-organized directories!

Directories are not search engines; directories do not send out spiders that index individual pages and nothing is added to the directory autonomously. Directories rely on websites being submitted to them; then a team of actual people looks at the site to categorize it and check its quality and relevancy before adding it to the directory in the appropriate categories and sub-categories. Web pages in directories are not found using keywords (although some directory sites, like Yahoo! and DMOZ will let you search the directory and Yahoo! also proves directory listings at the top of its search results pages), but by drilling down through relevant categories until they find the category that the site resides in.

Because humans check the relevancy and informational "worth" of a site before adding it to the directory, search engines can rely on this process being carried out for them and that the sites have been described correctly. Directories don't contain any of your site's content; they won't pick out information from META tags or page content or cache your pages. All they provide is a link to your site and sometimes a very brief description that you as the submitting webmaster would write. But it's this link that can be used to improve your SERPs listing.

Link popularity is still very much a big part of SEO, especially in the early days after a site goes live, and using web directories is an excellent way to build link popularity and increase your site's SERPs listing, provided you steer clear of link farms, or directories that prevent the indexing of their links for some reason. While everyday people will generally not use overly generalized web directories (but will still use specialist or niche directories if necessary) to find specific web sites, spiders will still regularly index them and the links they contain (unless they are blocked from doing this by the directory they happen to be indexing).

The more directories your site is listed in, the more inbound links your site will be seen as having, which in turn will improve your link popularity. Link popularity isn't the only thing to consider for SEO. It's not even the single most important thing to consider. But it is still a highly contributing factor and should not be overlooked.