Web Directories and Specialized Search Engines

Author: John Porter

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion's share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can't use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.

The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Web Directories:

A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind, search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how

clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Examples of Web Directories:

There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. Other popular general-purpose search directories are Google Directory and Yahoo! Directory, Another one MeraKhazana, in which you can submit article Free. The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.

Specialized Search Engines:

Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your niche.

For more information, please visit: www.merakhazana.com