When looking to start or grow an existing Internet business or even offline business there is one fact you cannot get away from. That simple fact is without traffic your business is going nowhere. This simple truth is universal to all Internet businesses and is tantamount to building a Wal-Mart on the moon it could be the biggest and best-stocked store ever but if no one can get there it is dead before it starts.



One of the best ways of promoting an online business and enhancing an offline business is with the use of web business directories. There are a few key benefits to this for your online and offline business and in this article we will look at some of those key benefits. Among these is the main lifeblood of business and that is traffic, directories can help generate this in a few key ways.

The first benefit to both on and offline businesses are web business directories. These are among some of the highest trafficked websites on the Internet with some of the highest Alexa rankings there are. The largest of these directories and probably the best known would be Yahoo, another large directory would be DMOZ (The Open Directory Project).

Alexa is a division of Amazon and it runs a web traffic rating service that ranks a website's traffic with the ideal ranking being number one. Some of the websites with high (actually the lower the number the better) traffic rankings are Yahoo #1, Ebay, MySpace, YouTube and Google.

The reason this number is important to potential web business directories you are looking at is traffic, these sites get lots of it. This is good for you as many people look to directories to find what they are looking for over search engines for the key difference between them. Based on human editors almost no web directory databases use robots as where search engines employ robots called bots, which use mathematical algorithms to index websites.

Many people consider the human element of a web directory to equate to a higher quality of listing as a human can notice simple subtleties that a computer just cannot notice. This human factor is what also gives the sites a higher authority ranking expressed through the high Page Ranks most established web business directories enjoy. Why is this Page Rank factor important to you and your business? Simply put Google gives greater credibility to sites through higher Page Ranks expressed on a scale of PR0 to PR10 with ten being the highest you can achieve.

When you list your site in a directory with a high PR some of that Page Rank passes on to your site and in essence it boosts your Page Rank which helps improve your results in the SERP's (search engine results page). This brings it all full circle as the higher your score in the SERP's the more traffic your website will get. The number of incoming links you have to your site (back links) directly relates to your position in the SERP's. Simply put the more one-way links you have the better your websites traffic will be.

What benefit is this to your offline business you may ask? Simple. As the world embraces the technology of the Internet and more and more people turn to it for solutions to problems the more your business presence on the web becomes increasingly crucial. Many people use web business directories as the modern day Yellow Pages. These directories can have advanced listings capabilities which can be anything from a few lines to extremely detailed business information such as business phone, address, product listings, photos of the business, etc.

This is an affordable way for an offline business of getting an online presence without actually having to build their own website. It can give the offline business a quick and simple way to join the modern way of doing business to a generation that is as comfortable doing business online as their parents were with a telephone.

They use the Internet as a way of gathering information to save time and make more informed decisions when they do chose to spend their hard earned money. In the end it boils down to this, web business directories are a way of connecting businesses and customers together in a more efficient way and to a larger, more informed audience.