Website directories: More than meets the eye

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Yahoo, DMOZ and ...
are probably familiar names to all ofus. Many people attempt to get their sites listed in ...
because it is a ... fact that plenty ofpeople visit them wh Yahoo, DMOZ and Looksmart are probably familiar names to all ofus.
Many people attempt to get their sites listed in thosedirectories, because it is a well-known fact that plenty ofpeople visit them when they want to find interesting sites.Thisin turn translates into a healthy flood of visitors to thesitesthat are represented in the aforementioned directories.While it is true that the directories themselves can producequite a bit of traffic, there are additional benefits that comewith a directory listing. Unfortunately, these advantages arenot often mentioned and that is why they are unknown to mostsiteowners.
Many are well aware that you can influence thedirectories by submitting to different search engines;for example, you can submit to Google and if you're lucky andthe keyword you're aiming at is rare enough, your site willappear in searches that are performed at Yahoo. But did youknow that directory listings can have a massive impact on howyour site performs in different search engines?Some of the large search engines, for example MSN and AOL, drawtheir search results almost entirely from differentdirectories.MSN relies heavily on Looksmart and AOL is affiliated withDMOZ.If your site is not listed in these two directories, it willnotappear in searches at MSN and AOL.
Since they both are very bigsites, receiving together around 100 million visitors eachmonth, it is very important to have your site well representedin them.So, we know that it is important to be listed in the majordirectories in order to get into some of the search engines. Isthat all? Nope.
The thing is, many search engines also ranksites based on whether they are listed in certain directoriesor not. Let's take an example: One of my sites wasn't rankingvery well at Google.
I had optimized it pretty well in myopinion and had received decent rankings under some keywords,but it still hadn't achieved the success I was looking for.Thispuzzled me, as I couldn't point out why the site wasn't doingaswell as I would have wanted it to.After working on it for a while, I decided to switch my focustoother promotion methods and get back to optimizing my sitelater. As I knew that both of them were good traffic providers,I chose to spend the time I had to submitting the site to bothYahoo and DMOZ.
Fortunately, my submissions were accepted andthe site was added to both directories after a while. A fewweeks passed and I begun to see referrals not only from Yahooand DMOZ, but also from Google in my logs.
I went back to checkmy rankings and noticed that they had vastly improved. And thenit dawned on me..I went back to DMOZ and managed to get another sub-section ofthe same site listed.
I waited for a couple of weeks for Googleto reindex and WHAM! This sub-section went from nowhere to befound to a Top 15 ranking on a competitive keyphrase with overhalf a million returns. The only thing that had changed wasthatthe page was now listed at DMOZ.This incident inspired me, so I went and looked if the sameprinciple could be applied to other engines as well.
I noticedthat nearly all of them appeared to give weight to directorylistings, but if the search engine happened to be affiliatedwith acertain directory, it was extremely important to be listed insaiddirectory in order to rank high. With Google, this directorywasDMOZ, with Excite it was Looksmart and so on.
Sites that werelisted in the right directories appeared to have a definiteadvantage against sites that weren't.My conclusion would be that the days when search engines anddirectories could be treated as separate entities are now gone.If you want to achieve high traffic, you're going to have totackle both at the same time. The traditional search engineoptimization methods - a keyword-intensive copy, meta tags,link popularity and so on - are far from being dead, but theredefinitely is a new major factor in play that you shouldaccount for.
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