Submitting websites to web directories
While web directories are extremely helpful tools to promote your website but they need to be used with caution. It may however surprise many people to find out that submitting to as many web directories that one comes across may not be a wise move as it might really harm your website’s page ranking than help it.
A web directory is not a search engine. It doesn’t list web pages in order of relevance as search engines do. They nevertheless list websites links in a categorized and sub-categorized manner. Web Directories are fairly helpful to your website because it helps directs visitors or traffic to your website. The main advantage of having your website submitted to web directories is the fact that it increases your search engine visibility and ranking. A lot of people therefore ask, just how several web directories does one require to submit to for its use to be effective.
Search engines make use of various parameters to determine the relevance and importance of your website over its competitors. Among the important elements considered are links to your websites from other websites. Search engines consider links from from another website as a recommendation from that website. It’s thus a certain way to improve your website’s importance or value before search engines which increases your page ranking. This has an even greater positive impact if the web directory enjoys a high page ranking. It’s like having a recommendation from an already respected website. So the higher the page ranking with the web directory the better it helps the page ranking of your own website.
To understand why not all web directories can help your website we need to go back to what search engines consider when ranking web pages. Most search engines especially Google continually change the factors used in ranking web pages in order to come out with relevant search results. However some search engines especially Google consider some web directories that do nothing but provide listing services as links dumps and rank them very poor. Google and some other search engines also frown at links appearing in non related or relevant pages and may consider them as link spamming. This would mean that having your links just posted on hundreds of web directories including those with bad page ranking and relevancy may not help your page ranking and may even lead to your website being banned.
In conclusion web directories are certainly very useful. Getting your website listed in as many quality web directories would definitely help your website’s promotion campaign. There is no fixed number of web directories that is recommended however you should be careful that you only use quality web directories with good category relevance and page rankings. This does not mean that you should avoid all new web directories with low page rankings as a new web directory with low page ranking today would increase in future, besides they are easier and faster to get listed on.
Whether free or paid listings, go for web directories that also offer other companies apart web listings as they’re ranked better by search engines. If you are to pay for the service be certain to check the page ranking of the pages where your link will appear and not just that with the web directory. Finally, the answer to the question of how several web directories to submit your website to is easy, submit to as many quality web directories as possible.