Importance of Directory Submissions

At its simplest, directories are a collection of web sites that have been chosen by humans and arranged into topic wise categories. Directories serve as a valuable resource for small business owners looking for ways to drive more traffic to their web sites.

Most search engines today gauge the importance of a web site by the quality and number of back links (links given from other websites) it has. One of the best and easily available avenues to increase the links to your company website is through directories. While directories are slowly losing out to search engines in terms of people using them to find information, they are still a major source of inbound links for a website.

As most of the directories are pre-screened by humans, the websites that make it to a directory are usually high quality. They are checked for their content and relevance. Thus, search engines tend to trust a website that already exists in a directory. Moreover, directories categorize different websites. This naturally gives a clue to the search engines about its content. For example, a website included in the category 'Web Design Company, India' in an established directory that contains the keywords in web design, web design company, India in the content as well as the meta tags will get a boost in a search engine when someone searches for this key phrase in a search engine.

In short, directories act as a search engine for links by category and subcategory rather than for web pages by keywords.

There is one more advantage of submitting your web site to a directory. Some of the well known directories also feed data to other, lesser known search engines and / or directories. Thus, if your web site is accepted in a directory, you are almost guaranteed of getting automatically indexed in these search engines. 

One of the most important directories is DMOZ. This directory also shares it database with some lesser known search engine

Directories are an extremely handy source for users who want to search locally, and are not happy with the SERPs shown by a search engine. Most well organized directories allow category wise browsing, and enable you to weigh your options in selecting a company or an entity easily.

There are many directories that exist today. While some of them have to e paid for a listing, there still are some good directories that accept and screen submissions without payment. Of course, not all free directories are good and paid ones bad, or vice versa. Rather, you should be judicious in choosing both paid and free directories to increase links to your website and increase your traffic and ranking as a result.