Search Engines and Web Directories

Posted on : May 8, 2008

Quite a lot of people mistakenly believe that search engines and web directories are the same thing—this is not the case. Search engines—such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Ask.com, among many others—are software programs that hunt for sites based upon whatever word or words the searcher indicates. Search engines look through their own databases of information; these databases are created by spiders that crawl the internet’s web pages and index all of the data that they find.

Web directories also have databases of information. And, they also have programs that will hunt for sites in their databases based upon a searcher’s given word or words. But, the difference between search engines and web directories is in how their databases are created. Whereas search engines use spiders that are constantly crawling the internet, web directories rely on actual people. People submit sites to web directories, and people maintain and organize web directories.

So, here’s the bottom line—your website can be automatically found by search engines, with no effort on your part. The spiders will eventually find it and index it and you don’t have to lift a finger. But, web directories will not index your website unless someone submits your site to them.

And, since a great many people prefer to use web directories for their searching needs, if you neglect to take the step to get your website submitted to any web directories you are losing out on a lot of potential visitors to your website. Plus—though it may seem odd—submitting your website to web directories can actually help your rankings in the search engines. This is because your web directory links will be crawled by the search engine spiders, thus increasing your rankings.

Submitting to web directories is a multi-step process that can be time-consuming; this is why it can make sense for many website owners to hire someone else to complete the process for them. Submitting to just one web directory can take up to five minutes. Now, that may not sound long, but when you consider that there are dozens of legitimate web directories to which you can (and probably should) submit your website, this adds up to a large chunk of time.

But, submitting to web directories can be something a website owner can do on his own—if he is careful to follow the rules of each web directory. Each directory has specific rules and regulations regarding submissions, and these must be precisely followed; if a website is not correctly submitted, it can be rejected.

Rules do vary, but here are two of the basic rules that many of the website directories may have.

Many web directories ask that the website owner choose a category under which their website should be listed in the directory. This is not as easy as it may seem. Directories can be very particular, so it is necessary to look at all of the sub-categories in order to try to select the one that fits best with the subject of the website. Even then, the web directory may disagree and reject a submission based on an incorrect choice.

Next, it is important for most web directories that the submission includes a clear and concise description of the website. This must be well-written and must make sense or it can cause the web directory to reject the submission.

Busy website owners may prefer to hire someone to submit their website to directories. Not only will it save time, but by hiring someone, website owners can ensure that their submissions will be accepted and that their descriptions will be well-keyworded—which will help them rise in rank even faster.

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Search Engines and Web Directories