Why You Need to Submit Your Website to Directories?
Filed Under Directories
Submitting a website’s URL to a web directory is one of the commonly-accepted practices among designers to help increase its visibility. The web directory submission process is time consuming but critical nonetheless. However, because it is so time-consuming, it is important to choose web directory submission sites that will be of the greatest value to a website’s search engine optimization and visibility. Where can you find a comprehensive listing of free directories? This is easy to do by just Googling “free web directory submission sites” or something similar. The verification of a directory site’s value remains up to you. Here are some parameters to consider when making a decision to submit a site to a particular web directory.
Is it a directory that requires payment or is it free? The distinct advantage of using a paid web directory submission site is that you will probably get listed faster but in most cases it ends there. However if a web directory cannot guarantee that your website will receive quality incoming traffic then there is no justification for paying. Possibly the other justification is that the category page where your site resides in a directory has a high Google page rank. Otherwise, you have little to lose by submitting to a free directory site.
Is the directory easy to navigate? You don’t want the directory site itself driving away your traffic because of navigational issues. Most directory websites use a drill-down approach to navigate through main categories and sub-categories. You should try it out for yourself and while navigating take note of any distractions like the overuse of advertisements. Also take a look at how many subcategories are listed under any given category. If the amount is excessive then it could be an indication of poor planning on the part of the web directory.
Always do web directory submission to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). And while you are there, you can actually find other web directories by searching for them from within dmoz.org. Google also mirrors the DMOZ directory in its own directory so you know that you’ll be listed with this giant search engine once accepted in the directory. Other directories also use the DMOZ so the result is a significant increase of inbound links to your submitted site which ultimately helps your page rank.
Does the directory present a professional image? Keep in mind that one of the objectives to any web site design is the conveyance of a message of trust. Likewise, your website can be negatively impacted if it is listed in a directory shared by sites involved in spamming, affiliate links, and excessive advertising. The same applies to the relevancy of other sites listed in a particular category. Only submit your site to directories that adhere to the highest standards of human editing.
Are search engines allowed to access links in the web submission directory? If not, then there is no real benefit to being listed in the particular directory you are evaluating. The way to tell this is by opening any web browser and keying in the URL (directory URL)/robots.txt where (directory URL) is the domain name of the web directory in question. The robots.txt file should tell you which categories are prohibited for scanning by the search engine crawler. The disallowed category will be preceded by the “Disallow” keyword in the robots.txt file. Also look at the HTML code of any particular category page to see if links use the “nofollow” keyword which tells a search engine to not follow a link in order to access the referenced website.
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