What makes a Directory SEO Friendly?

[bulsworth]

My company is preparing to launch a directory in the near future and I want to know what makes a directory SEO Friendly. It is the same factors as making a website SEO Friendly? I know that the directory should be made for the user, but part of the benefit of a directory is for companies that are part of the directory is to have the results show up in search engine searches.

A second questionI have is what do directories like superpages, citysearch and yahoo local do to make their search result pages or individual company profile pages show up high in the results? For example, when you do a search for henderson pizza in Yahoo you get the following results:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=he...h&ei=UTF-8&fl=0

The top results in this search was from bestredyp (sprint's yellowpages), superpages, citysearch, and yahoo local results. Is this just because either they have done a better job of optimizing their pages than local businesses, have some influence with the search engines or something else?

[snicksnack]

SEO friendly directories, are directories, where all the dynamic pages are converted into static html pages. Search engines prefer static pages and thus index these pages faster.

[mddv]

seo friendly urls through out the site, directories that are easily spidered by search engine bots.

[Ernster]

If your company is serious about making a directory than I recommend reading nearly every post, posted in this board, thats right every single one:D

Ive done it and also at some other forums, great resource forums can be.

Hope it goes well:)

[bulsworth]

Thanks for all the comments. My company is extremely serious about our directory. It is not going to be a run of the mill directory.

I do actually read as many posts about directories as possible from this and other forums. I agree that they are tremendous resources.

[tstaut]

Here's what I look for in a directory in terms of SEO...

I think things that make them SEO friendly for the people submitting include linked anchor text (surprising not all do that) and possibly bold/H1 category names or anchor text. Now you have to watch out for "rel=nofollow" tags as well. Also, categories that are TOO broad can lead to the relevance of any link on the page being questionable. EX: There's a "computers" category with no subcats... If I've got a template site surrounded by 10 mousepad companies, I'm not so sure the SE's are gonna find it all that relevant.

[dvduval]

Good URLS and a good navigation structure would be the main ingredients.

[dejaone]

this has been discussed many times here.

1) direct link for external URL
2) static URL for your directory page
3) good categories
4) easy to submit