If you have made the decision to use a web directory to promote your business, you have made a smart choice. Directories are growing and becoming increasingly effective in driving targeted traffic to websites. However, web directories are not created equal. That is, some web directories have more to offer online marketers and business owners than others.

You may already know that a good web directory can get you more visitors that translate into customers than some search engines. Bad web directories can leave your site off in la-la land — languishing and lonely. Distinguishing between the two will take some investigation on your part. Following are some tips for helping you distinguish good web directories from bad ones.

Five Criteria for Distinguishing Between a Good and Bad Web Directory

1. 1A good web directory does not accept every site submission. Instead, all submitted sites are examined and listed only when quality and ethical guidelines are met. A bad web directory lists less discriminately and may even list every site submission automatically. You should always test prospective directories by searching through websites they have listed.
2. A good web directory is organized in a way that makes sense to online users. Websites are listed under proper categories and those may even be broken into subcategories. A bad web directory may be a hodge-podge of listings and resemble a junk drawer more than anything else. Depending on your particular category, you may wish to choose a directory with a narrower focus.
3. A good web directory has a good search tool. Careful attention is paid to topics and search phrases and when visitors enter keywords, they are rewarded with results. We have all used search tools that could not seem to find the information or product we wanted when we knew the information was there somewhere. It simply was not findable. Such issues are a sign of a bad web directory.
4. A good web directory has quality content of its own and uses proper spelling and grammar. An excellent web directory may even offer searches in other languages. When it comes to doing business on the internet, communication is integral. Good directories communicate well. A bad web directory pays little attention to grammatical rules and language and can cause visitors to run long before finding your website.
5. A good web directory has been around for a while. Almost anyone can own their own web directory. The hard part comes in with managing, optimizing and marketing the directory. Generally, if you are paying for your site to be listed, you will want to use an established directory and forego the new ones. While new is not necessarily bad, the amount paid should be equal to the online presence presented.

Established directories will get more traffic. However, if the other criteria are met, submitting to a newer directory with lower pricing may be well worth your time and money.

Expect to spend quite a lot of time and energy sifting through web directories and making a list of the ones you feel will best promote your business. Finding the good ones may take some extra time but that time will make a huge difference in whether or not your business succeeds. Good web directories have the ability to take your online business further than you have ever dreamed.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a series of techniques used to get your website on page one of the major search engines for specific key words without paying for banner of pay-per-click traffic. There are many techniques that can create a tidal wave of traffic to your website. One of the oldest techniques has to do with submitting your website to a directory.

For anyone who doesn’t know, directories are websites that provide hot links to other websites. Good directories get a high Page Rank from the major search engines, which adds weight and credibility to your website. Essentially, having your website listed on the top directories is like buying yourself higher page rankings for your keyword focus. Ultimately, this technique can go a long way towards putting you on the first pages of the search engines.

There are many thousands of directories. Here is a side by side comparison of some of the best ones, in order to help you decide whether or not Yahoo! directory is worth your time and money:

Free Directories:

-World Web Index – Free for one month, or $25 for the year. Good PR from the other search engines
-Search Sight – Quick listings, with options for free inclusion
-Open Directory – The best and most exclusive directory on the web, you need to have a legit enterprise to be listed with these guys

Pay Directories:

-Business.com – This one is one of the best out there. $199 a year buys you a lot of PR through this directory
-Linkopedia – $10 a year gets you a good listing here
-Yahoo! – $299 per year. Yahoo! is a big name, but this is an expensive listing to pay for anyone out there.

Ultimately, directory listing has a lower impact as search engines reshape their algorithms monthly in order to include new search applications and techniques. Listing in a few directories has its uses, but you have to make sure that it’s not what you base your budget on.

At $299 per year, Yahoo is simply not worth it, given the unstable traffic return. You’d be much better off going with a few freebies and one good paid directory listing, and then focus on building links other ways. The key to finding good directories is using Alexa. Alexa will tell you the overall traffic ranking a give you a good idea of the overall PR for your chosen sites.

Once you’ve selected your favorite directory lists, go ahead and link in. Then, spend the rest of your time working on other linking SEO techniques. Yahoo! is very useful for a lot of things, but it’s just too expensive for directory listing.

The most important thing you’ll realize in maintaining your web page is that you cannot rely solely on search engine spiders and bots when they visit your site. These bots often cause duplicate content problems or list your site as junk, among other things.

For example, Googlebot has, in the past, done such things as move valuable pages into the Google supplemental index or given rank to pages that do not need it, such as login pages, register pages, subscribe pages and so on. As a result you need to guide these bots, or herd them, so that they only report on the pages that need to be ranked. But how? There are different ways to do this with varied success.

One way would be to use the nofollow meta tag. This tag instructs the search bots not to pass rank through a linked page, and it does it at page level rather than link level. It is up to you to decide if this is an adequate PageRank sculpting solution. One downfall of this is the incidence where page A is linked to page B on your site using the nofollow tag. In this case the PageRank would not carry from page A to page B. For this to work, however, you would have to know all the incidences of other pages linking to page B, which would be almost impossible to do.

One must concur that this method would not help your situation. Through outside links to your page, it would almost sure end up being ranked at some point. So you will still need to find a way to ensure that the incoming PageRank for page B is being passed to the most important web pages of your web site.

Another method is to disallow Page B as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /login.php

However, the same problem still persists in that external links can not be accounted for. PageRank would still be applied and it would come up as a result in a search.

There is a way to solve this problem, and it can be found in Google. Following are examples of methods to use:

1. Adding to page B the noindex HTML tag like this:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

or

2. Adding in your robots.txt the noindex directive using this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /login.php

This works because Google supports the Noindex robots.txt directive. However this method is not currently supported in other search engines. Furthermore, this directive enables you to block or advise Googlebot not to index or de-index a page, but it will not hinder Googlebot from following the links on page B, resulting in passing the PageRank to outgoing linked pages which are not protected.

Additionally you should not use the nofollow tag on page B because it will result in Page B becoming a dead end or dangling link. However, you can add the nofollow tag to outgoing links of page B, but you must ensure that at least one of the links can be followed.

In conclusion it seems that you can efficiently control your PageRank flow using the noindex directive and achieve maximum control within your website. You won’t achieve 100% control due to outside variables, but certainly enough to make your website productive and searchable as well as a valuable tool for you.