Is your website listed
in all the right directories?

By Dr Alex Davidovic

For most people the tool number one for finding goods and services is a search engine. However, statistically between 25% to 35% of people prefer directories to search engines, mainly for the following three reasons:

• Directories are maintained by human editors
  People who use directories instead of a search engine prefer the judgment of other people to the automated search-engine spiders.

• Quality!
  Despite all the efforts Google and other search engine providers are making, automated website evaluation can still be tricked into giving greater ranking to a site than it deserves - and the loopholes are constantly being exploited by unscrupulous marketers. Human editors are a lot harder to fool. They can and will reject a site if it does not meet the quality and other submission requirements.

• Objectivity
  Typically human editors insist on an objective evaluation of a website and frown upon claims such as "no.1 website in the world", "top site", "biggest range", "lowest prices" and the like. The editors tone down the language website owners use and present them in a more objective light.

Directories have a huge impact on the number of visitors to your website

Listing your website in the directories is an essential part of your Internet marketing strategy, and here is why:

• More visitors
  You attract visitors that you otherwise would not have had from this often neglected source of traffic.

• Your visitors are better "qualified"
  Search engines tend to bring visitors searching on more generic rather than highly-specific keywords and key-phrases. By comparison, people who use the directories find you after navigating through the categories to the one they need and reading about what your site has to offer. Because of that, directories typically send you visitors who are more "qualified", or in other words more likely to be interested in your services.

• Search engines give you better ranking
  The number and quality of websites linking back to your site play an important part whenever a search engine evaluates your site. You therefore pick up not only the traffic originating from the directories, but more search engine traffic because of improved ranking of your site.

• Search engines assign greater relevancy to your site
  When your site is listed under the proper category in a directory, search engines have a much easier job of deciding which keywords and key-phrases are relevant to your business.

Because of all this, it is not surprising that listing your website in online directories typically more than doubles the number of visitors to your website. Furthermore, directories and search engines give you a permanent source of "native" traffic - which is free, you get to spend your pay-per-click advertising budget elsewhere.

Are some directories better than others?

Listing your website with the Open Directory Project, DMOZ, is a must, not only because of the directory traffic but because of the search engine traffic as well. Namely, DMOZ is being used by a whole host by search engines.

It is also a good idea to submit your site to the Yahoo directory, but it comes with a price tag of $300 per year.

Apart from that, make sure your site is listed in all the direcories relevant to your industry.

What do you prefer:

1. Do-it-yourself. [ Check out advantages and disadvantages. ]

2. Do it with mentoring. [ Check out advantages and disadvantages. ]

3. Have it done. [ Check out advantages and disadvantages. ]

Visit DMOZ and submit your site. Decide for yourself whether spending $300 per year for the listing in Yahoo direcories is worth the cost. Do a search for all directories relevant to your business and submit your site to them.

Doing everything on your own can be daunting and overwhelming - if you prefer step-by-step approach with support every step of the way, consider joining the 12-step online mentoring program: the Underdog Marketing Challenge. One of the benefits of joining is the acceess to the Research Lab, which lets you do everything we talk about a lot faster and better.

We've used several companies for directory submissions, and unfortunately some were a total waste of time and money. Submit Edge is the only one we're truly happy with: reasonable pricing and excellent servcice.