Submitting your site to directories in the best strategy to get your site to the top of search engine results. If your site does not appear on the first two or three pages of search results, few people would come across it. And your site would not have any visitors.



Optimizing your Web pages for search engines is the starting point for getting to the top.

However, in competitive fields, thousands of sites are optimizing their pages for the same search terms. There are also many dud sites that "optimize" their pages by stuffing search terms. In this crowd, search engines have to use other criteria to identify which sites are good.

One way they do this is by looking at the links that point to your site. If there are many links that are relevant, and that come from good sources, they assume that your site is a good site, and display it higher up in their search result pages.

Relevant category listings in good directories are valued most by search engines. That is the importance of getting listed in directories. If your site is listed by a large number of good directories, the better your chances of appearing as a top search result.

To get listed in directories, you have to submit your site to them. Unlike search engines, directories do not go "crawling" the Web to find sites. Somebody has to bring your site to the directories' attention.

Now comes the second issue. Directory submission can be done automatically through directory-submission software or manually by hand submission. Which should you use?

Actually there is no issue here. Directories have come to hate automated submissions and give far more weight to manually submitted sites.

Why the Preference for Manual Directory Submissions?

Look at it this way. Automated submission software could submit thousands of sites every minute. And they do it indiscriminately without checking the submitted material.

As a result, directories receive a high proportion of absolute junk. The huge volumes of irrelevant submissions naturally irritate directory editors. And they come to hate the automated submission process.

Manually submitted sites are more likely to be appropriate to the categories they are submitted to. They would also be far less in volume. Hence directory editors give priority to sites that are hand-submitted by humans.

Hand-submission, however, is a tiresome, monotonous and time-consuming task. So you have to be careful in selecting the directories you submit to. How do you do this?

That is the focus of this article.

Selecting Directories for Manual Submission

There are directories and directories. Directories differ in the following ways:

• Some are specialized directories focusing on certain topics. Others are broad directories with numerous categories. Other things being equal, a listing in a specialized directory relevant to your theme carries higher weight.



• Some directories are established directories with a good reputation. For example, Yahoo and DMOZ are regarded highly by search engines.



• Some directories require payment for looking at your site. Thus Yahoo looks at commercial directories only if you pay $300.



• Some directories are not maintained up-to-date, as the are too few editors. DMOZ is notoriously slow in reviewing sites. It might take years before your site is reviewed, if at all.



• Some directories could be quite popular and bring traffic on their own, in addition to helping you with search engines.



• Many directories are new and could have many empty categories. Search engines might not yet have recognized these.



• Other directories are poorly organized and carry no weight for search engine ranking. Yet others are ?free-for-all' lists full of junk sites. A listing in these might even harm your rankings.



• A few directories might use "dynamic" pages to display their listings. Search engines tend to ignore dynamic pages.

To avoid wasting your time (and money if you decide to pay the directory), you have to select directories after considering all the above issues. Otherwise, even if you get listed, it might neither help you with search engines nor bring you any traffic.

In conclusion, let us mention one more issue. Paying money does not usually guarantee a listing. Money is paid for priority review where there is a large backlog of sites pending review.

If your site does not meet listing criteria, it might not be included in the directory even if you have paid money. So do check that your site has good content and meet other criteria.