The position that your site holds in the search engine rankings is often closely tied with how well connected you are. That simply means how well you are connected to other sites, do you have authority websites or indeed any websites pointing in your direction. Whilst there is no doubt that having a link with an authority site is an ideal way to boost your ranking, the reality is that for a small or niche business this may be difficult or expensive to achieve. For this reason an alternative such as a directory can be a much better option.

A web directory is a site that collates links and sorts them into categories. These categories are available to the public and can be a valuable resource for people looking for information. It is not a difficult process to get your site listed in a directory, and there is the option to get listed for free, but this can take some time; or to pay a one off fee that places your site in the directory.

The greatest benefit to having your site linked via a web directory is that you automatically generate a degree of link popularity. Important factors that you will want to look at once you have done this are the ranking of your site in the directory, this means what page rank you have overall in the directory, and what rank you have for your particular category in the directory. After this you need to look at where you are listed on the page that you are on, and the number of competing sites. The number, quality and how competitive you are against those other competitor sites is very important once you reach that point.

There are some pros and cons to using web directories as a link building option. Firstly the benefit of a web directory is that it is often much cheaper to establish a link via a web directory than with some authority sites, requiring a one time fee to be part of a web directory as compared to monthly fees to remain connected with authority sites. The downside of this is that whilst a web directory is a good option for establishing link popularity and for traffic building, the directory is essentially a hub, it has no nice or authority website status. This is fine if you are looking at the bigger picture of building link popularity and boosting traffic flow. If you accept the limitations of directories and weigh up your options you may find a good authority site in your area which may be a more suitable option.

The major web directories such as Yahoo will bring in a decent amount of traffic, so if you are looking at this side of things then a one off fee to these directories is a further option to boost your traffic flow. You should know several things if you wish to use directories for this purpose. To start with, directories are often utilized for establishing link popularity, therefore smaller directories may help with links, but they do not offer much in the way of extra traffic. Also bear in mind that many directories offer listings in a first come first serve basis, or simply just alphabetically and the search algorithms used vary greatly from one directory to the next. Paying to be part of many directories then starts to become somewhat less attractive when you consider these things.

There are distinct benefits and drawback to having your site listed in a directory. Weigh up your options and see how you view the investment of time and money to list in a directory fitting in with your overall plans for link building and site traffic, and then you will be in a position to evaluate what benefits directories may offer you. Like many things, you may find that a mixture of several different option will best provide just the solutions you are looking for.