If you are a webmaster, then you’ve probably submitted your website to several directories, you may even run one yourself. There are thousands and thousands of directories out there on the net and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Good webmasters need to be able to evaluate these differences to assess what directories will be worth the time, effort and money to submit to. Traffic

While all webmasters would like more traffic, and often have the goal of obtaining more visitors from directory submissions, the truth of the matter is that most directories don’t bring in very many visitors. Even DMOZ, one of the largest and most popular directories on the web, brings in few surfers for many sites listed there. And other directories that spend several thousand dollars each month on advertising may only bring a few visitors.

Now don’t get me wrong, sites in popular directories listed in a good spot near the top of popular categories many indeed see a nice amount of visitors, but this is the exception rather than the rule. But even one visitor a month is better than none.

Free vs. Paid

Some directories are free, some require a reciprocal link and some require a onetime payment or a recurring payment. Yahoo’s directory, for example, requires a recurring annual payment of $299. DMOZ is free, but many sites wait for years to be listed. One of the advantages of paid directories is that the fact that they are not free slows down the submissions, which in turn slows down the saturation of the directory.

This factor can make a purchased directory entry a very worthwhile investment, these directories are often of higher quality as well, which makes them a better resource for users, which can make them a better source of traffic than junky free directories.

One thing to note here is that you definitely want to avoid FFA link pages. Free-for-all link pages are typically uncategorized lists of links that often require no administrative review for submission, this results in a spammy, uncategorized, saturated list of links that you really don’t want to be associated with. So, in summary, take advantage of the quality free directories, but don’t write off the paid directories if you are seeking to gain high quality back links.

Whenever you have started to work with websites you will surely face the problem of website promotion and how to increase the website’s page rank? It is quite a great point for discussion. However, we can outline here several of the most important and effective ways of website promotion, which are directory submission and link building.

Directory submission of your website has several benefits.

 The first benefit is that it will contribute to the growth of incoming traffic. You will get direct, targeted traffic from directories. Another benefit of this service is that you will get high quality, one-way links to your website from page rank directories. These back links directly contribute to your overall search engine rankings. And finally, the directory submissions will contribute to drastically improving your Google Page Rank. The higher your page rank, the higher you are going to be listed in all search engine results for specific keywords. These are three enormous benefits that any webmaster needs to focus on in order to survive on the internet today.

The Importance Of Website Submissions

Applying and using all kinds of search engine optimization methods has become a necessity in a day and time when the competition on the World Wide Web far
surpasses competition in the real world. Some of the main SEO strategies that most webmasters nowadays resort to are directory submissions, building link popularity,
increasing text links to raise page rank, using keyword optimized content etcetera.

However, many people fail to use one major SEO tool—web site submission. Website submission refers to the process of submitting your website to major search engines and directories. Many services providing site submission services also submit your sites to internet directories, which is necessary if you actually want website
submission to work for both you and your website.

Search engine submission is a necessary SEO technique, which should be used much before any other, except perhaps keyword optimization. This is because most websites do not get indexed by search engines until and unless a search engine submission is made with each particular search engine. Needless to say, your website will never feature in search engine results pages unless it is indexed.

While there are hundreds of search engine submission services who will readily submit your  website to thousands of search engines for a few dollars, it is important to note that most search engines have become smart enough to reject software generated submissions. If you want your website to be actually submitted to search engines, then make sure that you hire a quality service that makes manual search engine submissions.

When it comes to submitting your website to directories, many times the website would have been better off never having been submitted at all. When a website is properly submitted to a web directory it can do great things for the site over time. Alternatively, when a website is improperly submitted, it tends to be a giant waste of time. Don't submit your website to search engines, just get it linked by a few websites that get crawled regularly and the engines will automatically index and deep crawl your site within a week or two, sometimes faster.

Submit manually to the major directories

Always submit websites to free directories manually. Getting your site listed in the major web directories is sufficient to increase your search engine rankings and traffic. Those listings will get picked up by all the other search engines, filtering down to mirrored directories and smaller search sites all over the net, increasing your link popularity quite a bit in the process. Submitting to these large directories does not take very long, especially if you make a list and get the required information together on a text editor (cut & paste away). That being said, there is no logical reason to risk using automatic submission tools or software that promises to "submit your site to 1000 search engines and directories". It's also a policy violation of some search engines and most directories to use automatic submission tools, which could result in your site being banned (and getting a site unbanned is no fun whatsoever).

Where to submit your website

When promoting a website, usually submit it to the following directories: The Open Directory  and sometimes Wow Directory. Each of these directories has a free listing option. If you run a commercial website, a paid listing is sometimes your only option. For non-commercial sites, you find spending the money on paid inclusion is a bad allocation of resources. Yahoo currently (2004) charges a non-refundable $300 to be considered for a commercial listing, $600 for sites of an adult nature, and commercial listings have a $300/year recurring fee. That money can go a LONG ways in alternate promotional methods.

How often to submit a site

Submit your website as soon as you have a domain name and a good amount of complete, live content. The basic rule of thumb is not to submit a website more than once per month, and don't submit websites with "under construction" pages visible. Different directories have different rules, however once per month is a long enough span no major directory would deem it spam.

More on search engine submissions

The subscriber's area contains additional information about using proper descriptions and keywords in directory submissions of your website, writing objective descriptions that will increase your chances of being listed, how to streamline your submission to ensure the fastest review, and resources such as smaller topic specific directories in which your website may qualify for listing.

Without a doubt, one of the best seo techniques for any website is to list the website in a popular online directory. If the directory is viewed as highly "trusted" by the search engines, then a link to your website will confer some of that trust on your website. In simplest terms, the more high value links you have from web directories, the greater value your site will be perceived to have. These high Page Rank (PR) links increase the PR of your site in return.

Few webmasters realize the real potential of the web directories. However, the ones who do always manage to reap the rewards of a good web directory submission campaign. This is, on many occasions, what makes the difference between existing on the World Wide Web and not being visible at all.

So what exactly are web directories? Well, it is what the name states. It is a directory which contains links to other websites on the Internet. It manages and categorizes the site submissions it receives based on each site’s theme.

Many people confuse the link directory with the search engine. While the former simply manages categories and places the web sites in the category that they belong to, the latter displays the sites based on the keywords that represent them.

There are various types of web directories. Depending on the subjects they cover, they can be either general directories or specialized directories. The general directories cover any theme, and they have broad thematic coverage. In other words, any site can make a submission to these directories, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the policies (for instance, there are directories which don’t accept adult or gambling sites, but there are some which accept them).

The main two advantages of web directory submissions are the extra traffic you get and the back links to your own site (which is good for your search engine rankings and which ultimately also turns into traffic). However, if you do it strictly for the back links, make sure that the directories you submit to don’t associate the no follow attribute with the link (which basically means that the search engine will not follow the respective link).

The most notorious web directories are the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ (the Open Directory Project). The Yahoo Directory has two options, a free one and a paid one, and DMOZ is free (however, you will probably have to wait a few months until you get included, because the links are manually reviewed and included in the directory by a group of volunteers). But in the end, it’s well worth it because if you make a consistent web directory submission campaign, you will certainly see great results.

You want to rank well in Google, but you need to ask yourself: why should you rank well? It’s more obvious why you want to rank well; you want more visitors, you want to spread the word on something that is important to you, you want to change the world, or maybe you just want to sell something, facing strong online competition. But why should you rank well? In the eyes of Google and others, you’re just another webmaster – but search engines first and foremost cater to the searcher. So you better make sure you deserve to be ranking well in Google for whatever it is you deliver to the searcher.

Search engines mainly understand text. So you need to make sure you create interesting, in-depth content in the form of text. It won’t hurt to include Flash animations, videos, or lots of images – but it also won’t help the search engine. A good test of whether your text can be seen in search engines is to open the source of your page (right click your site and choose “view source”, or however your browser calls it) and then check if that text appears.

Make your content accessible

Every page should ideally be doing one thing only (and that one thing well). If you have a page where you sell dog coats, then it should have a header that reads “dog coats” along with a dog coat photo, your dog coat articles for sale, and a description of just what a dog coat is. Furthermore, there should be a (limited) set of links on that page leading to related areas of your site, like a page where all dog supplies are found, a page that describes your company (handing out contact info like your company address and your email address), a page leading back to your homepage, and so on.

Every page title should be unique to your site, and accurately & briefly describe your page’s content.

Use proper markup, with tags like <h1> and <h2> (headers), <p> (paragraphs), <a> (links) and so on, and make sure it validates as HTML4 Strict or XHTML1 Strict by checking with the “officials”. There’s a multitude of ways to display a header – using an embedded Flash animation, for example – and there’s a multitude ways of displaying links – using dropdown combo-boxes, or JavaScript, to name just two – but steer clear from any of that. Keep the HTML simple, and use JavaScript, Frames, or any of that only where you absolutely must, and use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to deliver a page layout.

Make each page rest on a simple, stable, and quick-loading place. For example, don’t move your pages to different URLs all the time, don’t create redirects, and don’t use overlong, complicated URLs. Simple & stable pages invite others to bookmark your pages or link to them, and it allows search engines like Google to assign a “trust" value to your page.