Basic concept of directories

You need to submit your website to directories

Submitting to directories is the first step in website promotion. Directories usually only accept sites that offer quality information. Because all sites submitted to directories are reviewed by humans, sites that are of low quality rarely get accepted. This is a straight-forward simple to understand internet marketing activity which can be performed by any website owner.

Search engines, on the other hand, normally accept almost any site or page without looking at its quality. Again, the reason is that 'bots' and 'spiders' do the job not humans. They are not artificially intelligent to recognize the quality of the content or design of a website. Not yet any way.

A directory is divided into two distinct parts: Commercial and Non-Commercial Directories. They are analogous to, especially in the U.S., Yellow Pages and White Pages respectively. As we all know, Yellow pages directory is a listing of businesses whereas White pages directory is a listing of individuals

The Commercial directory contains the addresses for websites that sell something, either products or services. The Non-Commercial directory contains the addresses for websites that sell nothing but has information about a certain topic just like the website you are reading now.

The directory is organized into categories such as Arts & Humanities, Business & Economy, Computers & Internet, etc. etc.

If your website is about selling products and/or services, you might want to try to submit to "Business & Economy" in the commercial directory, preferably for free.

Advantages of manual directory submission - for the Do-It-Yourself folks
1. The initial extra effort will pay off when the ranking of your website increases.
2. The right links will help you in getting the right traffic to your website.
3. You can study the requirements and structure of the directory to which you are submitting
    to get a better understanding.
4. To do it right, you carefully select the categories and subcategories in order to ensure that
    you are submitting to the right niche.

Except those that want to sell you their product, more and more SE gurus are advising not to autosubmit  to these indexes because a properly done manual submission is essential to getting the best possible results. A properly optimized directory listing will often generate close to 40% of your clickthroughs. Besides, you'll often get in directories in less than a month, whereas the major search engines often take a lot longer to add your website.

Importance of Directory Submissions
A simple way to obtain inbound or back links is to submit your link to directories. Online directories exist for the sole purpose of providing links to web users to various sites categorized under relevant topics. “Directory submission” is a website optimization strategy that no website owner should ignore.

Directories catalog links for easy access to users. Much earlier, directories were the primary source for web users to find websites on various topics. Today search engines have taken over but directories have not lost their importance yet. You cannot obviously expect too much traffic from a directory submission. But you can expect an improvement in your search engine placement.

Some directories even feed their databases to other directories and search engines. Search engines base a certain factor on directories in judging a website popularity and relevance. Depending on the quality of the directory and the number of back links your website has, search engines will be able to determine your relevance and qualify your website accordingly.

If your website is low on content but rich in images, flash content, etc. search engines may not be able to categorize your website when the search spider visits your site. By submitting to a directory under a particular category, you allow the search engine to categorize your site under a relevant topic.