Once you decide to submit your site(s) to directories, the first step is obviously to make a list of [...]]]> One of the reasons why people submit their sites to directories is to do with Search Engine Optimization – get higher pagerank because of quality and quantity of backlinks that directory submissions offer.

Once you decide to submit your site(s) to directories, the first step is obviously to make a list of directories to which you plan to submit your site. From this list of directories you have compiled, you would then have to narrow down on the ones that are search engine friendly. By this we mean a directory that will return links that are counted and valued by the search engines. There would be no purpose in getting a directory link to your site if the links weren’t search engine friendly or ‘SEO-Friendly’. If the links you get don’t matter to the search engines, they won’t matter to your website either! There are several things you should do to ensure that your links are SEO friendly:

1. Ensure that there are no META nofollow or noindex tags on the link pages:

To do this, you would have to view the page source of one of the link pages in the directory. The page source can be viewed simply by right clicking your mouse. You would see an option that reads ‘View Source’ or ‘View Page Source’. Click on the option to view the source code of the entire page. Within that page, look closely for the following code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

If you do find this code mentioned on the page, don’t bother submitting your site to that particular directory, as the search engines would not count the links it gives out. When ‘noindex’ is written in the code, it basically tells the search engines not to index the page, while ‘nofollow’ tells the search engines not to follow or count the links on the page.

Therefore, even if only one of these parameters exist in the META tags of a link page, avoid submitting to that directory.

2. Ensure that the links do not have a ‘rel=nofollow’ tag on them:

You should also make sure that the links on a page do not appear in the following format as this also commands the search engines not to follow links:

<a href=”http://www.domain.com” rel=”nofollow”>Domain</a>

The directories that give out such links would be worthless to submit to, hence it is important that you first view the source code of each directory to ensure that the links you may receive from them will be valued and counted by the search engines.

3. Ensure that the links are not JavaScript generated links:

When the source code is viewed, the links should appear only in the standard <a

href=”></a> format. If any other coded format is used, you can be certain that the links are not SEO friendly links and would hence, be ignored by the search engines.

4. See that that the links do not redirect to another page

Some directories give out links that redirect to a page other than the home page. These links are not valuable as they are not direct links to the site.

5. URL of the link pages should not contain too many parameters

You have to ensure that the URL of the link page does not have too many parameters. An example of such a URL is:

http://www.webdirectory.com/link.php?u=23&as=2323434324&as=23423asfsfas&pw=32433.

Although this factor alone may not make a directory non-SEO friendly, it is believed that search engines either don’t index or don’t place too much value on those pages that have too many parameters in the URL.

Only if a directory passes all these criteria, will it be considered an SEO-friendly directory.

Universal Site Directory passes all the above criteria and therefore it is a good place to submit your website. The vision of this directory is to become the definitive guide to all worthwhile websites in the next 3 years. I invite you to submit your website to this directory.

You may also like to read the benefits of submitting your site to Universal Site Directory.

End Note:

Before getting down to the actual task of making submissions to other directories, you would first have to compile a list of several such SEO-friendly directories to which it would be worthwhile to submit your site. This would involve the laborious task of having to go through several hundreds of directories independently to see if they match the criteria for SEO-friendliness.

This is where a submission service, like Directory Maximizer, comes in handy since they do all these checks for you before starting with your submissions.

Of all the myths about directories if I have to give some credence to any one, this would be it. It is true that in the internet world today, more often than not when someone has to look for a website, the first thing [...]]]> 1.     No one looks at directories in the Googleised world 

Of all the myths about directories if I have to give some credence to any one, this would be it. It is true that in the internet world today, more often than not when someone has to look for a website, the first thing that they do is use a search engine.

Having said that, we also need to understand that to get a high rank in the Search Engine Results (SER), there are many factors that one has to work on. Two such factors are the much talked about keywords and backlinks.

First the keywords – everyone uses them – people make websites for search engines and not users – however much Google or anyone else might advice otherwise. The end result is that in many cases a search result might return web pages that rank high but do not really give quality content – the quality of content cannot really be rated by a search engine bot – they are still not that intelligent.

Coming to back links, it is common sense that a website will be able to acquire quality back links only over a period of time – a kid cannot become a man overnight. So a site that is older will have more back links than a site that is not so old. 

The final result is that even though a browser might first use search engines for finding information on the internet, he may not get what he is looking for. In that case the next best bet would be a Web Directory in which websites are listed by category and further topic wise divisions.  

Perhaps this is also the reason why both Google and Yahoo, the two most popular search engines have their own web directories as well.

2. Directories are no longer important today from the SEO perspective

This  is not true at all. A web Directory is also a website and if it is a quality site and lists quality websites, then the links from it would be valued by search engines.

Matt Cutts says the following on his blog when asked, “Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?”

Matt Cutts: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:

- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.