Why should you submit your website to web directories ? The short answer is to draw visitors to your website because more visitors to your site would typically mean more business for you. Good directories like Yahoo, DMOZ and Business.com let visitors to your site on their own. Many people use these directories to search for information. Then there are topic specific or region specific niche directories that have their own group of users.
Search engines use software “robots” to locate, bring back and index a great number of websites landing on the Web. These robots cannot exercise the kind of judgment humans do while assessing a website. So the engines look at human-edited directories to offer an indirect assessment of websites.
A large number of relevant directory listings (links) could help your site to move towards the top in search engine results. And if your website ultimately manages to reach the first or second (or even third) page of search results (for search words that are typically used to find your kind of businesses), it could indeed benefit your business significantly (provided you do have a good product and a good website).
Submitting Your Site to Directories
Unlike search engines, directories do not crawl the Web looking for new websites. That means you (or somebody else) would have to bring your website to the attention of directories. Submitting details of your website to the directories is the way to do this.
All directories call for certain standard details about the sites submitted to them. These include a short title, the URL of the site and a short description of your site in a limited number of words. Some directories might also require your email address and other details.
Directories also require that you submit your site to the most appropriate category. You drill down the directory structure and find the category that best fits your site. This is often a troublesome task as there might be more than one category where your site could be listed.
It is far better to submit your website by hand to each directory, complying with the guidelines of each. Your website is more likely to be accepted in that case.
