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Why Directories Still Have SEO Benefits
By David Lopez (c) 2010

Web directories have been around since the beginning of the
World Wide Web in the early 1990's and are still recognized as
an important channel for advertising businesses online. People
often get web directories and search engines mixed up. The
difference between a search engine like Google and web
directories is that Google uses a web crawler to automatically
index websites to show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages),
while a web directory organizes links under various categories
and sub-categories.

How Can Submitting to Directories Help Your Website?

Here are some tips:

Get Indexed Quicker in the Search Engines

When search engines crawl directory websites any new entries
within those directories also get crawled and indexed.
Directories that are deemed authoritative by search engines like
Google are crawled regularly, finding new website links to index
which are then ranked to appear in the search results. If you
are launching a new website, you should seriously consider
submitting to website directories to speed up the process of
getting indexed into Google.

Increase Your Positions in Google
 
As many website owners should know the more quality links to
your website that you obtain, the more favorably Google will
rank your website. Website Directories are a great source for
one-way or reciprocal links. Well maintained directories will
place your link in an appropriate category or sub-category,
meaning that the directory's human moderators agree that your
website is about what your website claims to be about and is
useful to human beings.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

Having a listing on a popular, high traffic website directory
can also bring you website traffic. You can usually judge
whether a web directory receives much traffic from looking at
its Alexa rank. This can be found simply by going to
www.alexa.com and entering the directory's domain name into the
search field. The lower the "Alexa rank" the more traffic the
website gets. You can also get a "Country Rank" that indicates
how much traffic it gets per country. If the Alexa rank is
100,000 or less, you can be confident that you will get some
traffic from it.

How to Pick Good Directories from Bad Directories

Good website directories allow you to enter your preferred link
title that best describes what your website is about. The link
title, or anchor text, is an important factor in determining
where your site appears for certain search terms in Google's
search results.

Good website directories are human edited, meaning that links
are not approved automatically. This means that a directory
moderator will review your website before making the listing
live and won't approve your website if it does not meet the
directory's quality guidelines.

Many website directories that were previously actively moderated
and regularly updated are now pretty much dormant. One way to
determine this is to see if the directory shows link statistics
on the number of links approved and the number of links awaiting
review. If the number of links awaiting approval is vastly larger
than the total number of published links, it's probably a waste
of time submitting a listing.

Good website directories pass Google Page Rank through links to
your website within their directory listings, but there are
directories out there that prevent this from happening. They do
this by using a tag in their links called a "nofollow attribute."
If the link to your website contains this tag, it is rendered
almost useless to you.

Good directory websites do not accept links to rubbish websites
(link farms and websites with nothing but affiliate or
advertising links) or to sites that are otherwise not useful
to real humans. A directory worth its SEO salt should also not
allow links that redirect to another site.

Good directory websites require manual submission. Avoid
automated directory submission software because there is a good
chance that any directories that accept automated software
driven submission are not going benefit your website.

Google, Paid Links and Directories

There is a lot of confusion about Google's policy of penalizing
websites for buying links. This is aided by the fact that Google
does not really have a clear policy on paid links. Should you
avoid paying for links from website directories?

From what employees of Google have indicated, human-edited
website directories are generally okay with Google because there
is editorial review. The directory is not considered to be
selling the link, just the review and the listing service.

Manual Directory Submission Services

Manually submitting a website to online directories is a
time consuming, seemingly pointless task. It's important to be
discerning about the directories that you submit to in order to
make sure that it will help your website rather than waste your
time. There are numerous manual directory submission services
available these days that offer to do all the manual submission
for you. A problem with a lot of these is that you need to be
able to see the results. Also, it can take days, weeks, or even
months for many submissions to go live and the quality of the
directories submitted to can vary.

If you don't have time for manually submitting your website to
the online directories and the benefits that your website can
receive from such efforts, talk to an SEO expert. They can
either perform this service as part of an overall SEO strategy,
or identify a quality web directory submission service provider
to use.
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David Lopez is an <a href="http://www.professional-seo.com.au/">
emarketing consultant with 10 years experience on internet
technologies and working as part of the AWD team. David is
currently offering a free 1 Hour eMarketing consultation for new
and existing clients of AWD.
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