Directories are a well organized collection of websites/blogs/forums that make it easier for users to find websites related to different content. Each link on a directory includes a short description of the website.

Submitting your websites and blogs to directories is a good way to get some back links. Some also consider it a reasonable way to increase traffic. But is this really true and worth the trouble?

There are three types of directories:

1. Free Directories: Free directories accept all links for free. Some directories may not ask you for money but may require you to add a reciprocal link to their directory on your website.
2. Paid Directories: Paid directories require you to pay to get your link approved.
3. Both Free and Paid: These are directories that are a combination of Free and Paid directories. You can pay to have your link listed as a featured link and thus gain more exposure.

Directories provide you with useful back links and can act as a relevant source of traffic (However you rarely see any change in). Webmasters usually consider PageRank before submitting their site to a directory. Having a link on a directory with high PageRank can help improve your website’s PageRank and can help you get traffic to your site.

However, webmasters end up getting very less PageRank benefit and traffic from directories.

The reasons for this

1. PageRank – Eventhough some directories may have high PageRank for their homepage, their inner pages, where your link will be placed, rarely have any PageRank. Thus, your website’s PageRank does not get much boost.
2. Traffic – We have search engines to digg up websites for us without wasting any time. Thus, it is highly possible that your site won’t get much traffic from directories because not many people visit them to look for websites.

Now, is it worth the trouble? Yes! Submitting directories is still a good way to build some back links even if they may not boost your PageRank as much as you expected. Submit your websites/blogs to directories whenever you have a chance. Sooner or later, everything will all add up and you will notice the benefits. When it comes to SEO, every little thing counts.

When we hear the word “Backlinks”, the first thing that comes to our mind is numbers. This site has 100 backlinks, so and so site has 1000 backlinks and so on. But now the numbers game is slowly dying, as building quality backlinks has become much more important than building too many links. Quality and relevant backlinks are two very important considerations in Search Engine Optimization. A backlink from a site that has quality content as well as content related to the theme of your website is much better than a backlink from a inadequately optimized or irrelevant website.

It is way better to get trusted backlinks. Finding sites that have “Real Backlinks” and getting your links on real pages is really cool and winning trust can be done. The only issue here is, it takes a long time to get your links on real pages e.g. the home page of relevant and high PR websites. But at the end of the day, it is worth getting these trusted links than just increasing the volume of links crazily from irrelevant and poorly optimized sites.

Quality backlinks are a must and numbers are not that important anymore. This is the reason why a site might rank high inspite of having a few backlinks.

Pagerank, in plain vanilla terms, is the function of the incoming links to a site. That means that essentially, the higher the number of links the higher is your pagerank. Of course there are other factors like the pagerank of the page where your link is placed and the number of outgoing links on that page that affect the end value of your site’s pagerank.

However, the theory that higher page rank means higher rankings and better search engine placement is absolutely false. If that was the case, then Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and all other PR 10, 9 and 8 websites would be ranking for every keyword searched for.

Hence, it would be a folly to aim for just a Pagerank, without focusing primarily on optimizing the site for key terms that will result in quality traffic.