Why add your site to Link Directories

So what good is it adding a site to a directory?

The link directories used to be a way for users to find sites they were looking for. There were no trustworthy search engines back then and the only way to get, at least to some extent, links to valid sites within a certain topic was, through manually validate all sites. There are a couple of big projects of registring the whole internet, or at least the quality sites. One of the old and trusted ones is the ODP. ODP has lots and lots of editors manually looking through sites reported to the directory.

Today the link directories fill another purpose, at least main purpose, lots of people actually click on the links in directories and there are more directories then you might think that have serious traffic. One of the bigger one is the swedish company Eniro with Eniro.com, you can find much more than site links here but it is still a link directory in general. The purpose then is getting the links indexed by search engines such as our big friend Google. All the smarter search engines measure a sites worth in a certain keyword depending on the amount of links to it with the word as title. This is the single most important factor in deciding how high in the search results to show a certain page.

Of course there are other things that matter when deciding, such as the title and headings of the page but what gives the page strength is the amount of inbound links. Links from sites with higher trust will also give more power in the outbound links so there are lots of reasons to make sure you get as many links as possible, from as strong sites as possible.