Adding Content to Directories

I thought it might be fun to talk about content on directories, its importance and if an owner should add their own or let it build naturally.

The First type of content is the directory listings themselves.

Do you feel it is beneficial for a directory to add listings themselves? Also do you think that it is important to ensure that the descriptive text is unique?

The second kind of content is articles either in a blog add on or through a means of posting articles built into the directory itself.

Is either of these features important to have on a directory? Do you feel that either a blog or a built in article system is more beneficial in its use? Is uniqueness of article content important? If you use either of these systems do you allow for outside article submissions?

Anyway – it is really just something to chat about so feel free to chime in and there may be other angles to content that you want to add.

 

The directory listings is important especially for directory owners as they earn some money (small money) by means of that. Your second kind of content is the article, well for me it will make sense only if they allow to put atleast two do follow links on each blog or article.

 

Many directories have tried blogs (aviva, your directory, zorg come to my mind). Does MyGreenCorner also have a blog? Will look it up.

I don't think blogs on directories work all that well. Other resources are directory lists (vmoptions), forums (v7n) and themes etc. (MGC) do much better. I had seen 'celebrity wallpapers' on ozami, not much of content there except celebrity profiles.

I think blogs can do much better then they do right now.

 

Yeah there are many examples with blogs. Personally I like them in many ways but in others not so much. Just being honest. What I like about them is that visitors do like and read blogs and there is some satisfaction in that. On the other hand there is a lot of pressure with a blog in generating content. A blog requires regular posting and one either has to write and write and write some more or hire writers.

Directory lists can definitely generate some traffic - down side to them is visitors come to find free directories usually and I doubt that converts well. I do think there would be other benefits though.

I seriously considered a forum for a while but at the time i would see postings onr dp offering $$ for people to post on their forum. I did not see the point in putting up a forum and then paying people to post there.

 

That's right, most blogs loose steam after first 5-10 posts. Biggest problem with directory blog is 'target audience'. Are you targeting SEOs who come to your directory for submissions? Or you are targeting webmasters and small business owners who might like your blog enough to buy a listing? ;-)

Forums need a dedicated set of initial posters and moderators to make the forum look busy. In last 2 years I have joined more than 50 forums and visited them regularly; but I don't find enough 'action' there.

 

Not specifically about directories but in general i would advise against starting a forum.

I feel people much prefer communicating through blogs and social networking.

I find most of the meaty information that i seek on blogs, forums seem like an older way of doing things now, if a forum is established its not such a challenge but anyone thats honest with you will tell you how hard it is to get a forum really rolling.

I have one forum and theres more tumble weed there than posts in fact while writing this reply its got me thinking that i shall maybe remove the forum and put a blog in its place, theres plenty of activity in the niche of the forum that i have but its mainly with blogs.

 

If the diredctory is well structured and all listings are unique in their descriptions then you don't need additonal content... ie make it useful for humans and they'll use the site!

 

For a general directory it's important (IMO) for the owner to hunt and add content rather than wait for it to come to him. It fleshes out areas that would often be devoid of content if handled the other way.

This is especially important if a directory charges for review or placement... because the sites that are a labor of love instead of revenue producing are not likely to pay a dime... and there are some very nice "hobby" sites available for places like History and Arts categories.

Adding content yourself has the added benefit of providing a more developed structure for those that would submit. Putting some sites in is roughly analogous* to a hunter tossing out decoy ducks on the water so the ones flying overhead will decide it's a good spot to land if those other birds like it. Nobody wants to submit to a virtually empty directory, or even an empty cat in an otherwise well built directory.


*[I said "roughly" analogous... DO NOT shoot the submitters that follow the ones you added.]

 

Imho adding sites is important and useful for 2 reasons.

The first is it adds unique content to your directory (and yes the descriptions should be unique) and if those sites are good quality and have concise meaningful descriptions it will give potential submitters an idea of the sort of submissions you expect. A quality site is more likely to submit to a category populated with similar sites, a spammy site (hopefully) will realise it has no chance of being accepted and not bother submitting.

Also by searching for sites to populate a category you learn more about that niche, you find sites which you need to create a new sub-category for, maybe find some sub-categories you created are redundant or can be better named or recategorised to a higher or lower level etc.

As for added content, If you have the time and resources to do it properly it can only help in increased traffic, stronger branding and more chance of submissions.

 

A forum is a spam magnet. You would find yourself wasting a lot of time managing the spam or paying someone to do it for you.

Many directory submissions would be duplicate content in their submitted form. Writing a better description is the best option. This is not bad on a directory submission where the text is not long, but on articles it can be an issue. But then again it all depends on how much the editor/directory are being paid and if that is a consideration when review/editing costs are calculated.

 

The most important content for a directory is its listings
check the additions for 1 day here:
http://botw.org/new/all/07302009.cfm
http://dir.yahoo.com/new_additions/20090730/all.html

Notice there are more daily additions to botw than in yahoo. Most of them are cleary added by editors.

 

@mhamdi - I agree that listings are by far the most important aspect of a directories content. Yahoo is also a nice example of having more content than just the listings through articles etc.

 

content will help your dir to rank better and people know about your dir.

 

i always want to create a blog for my directory,
it's easy like 1,2,3,
but what topics should i blog about?
should the content must related to the niche directory?

 

what's this directory for ? sorry maybe this's noob question

 

I started and have since neglected adding news stories to my pet directory. I did not simply take feeds but researched and wrote my own. Several of the articles must rank fairly well because they are bringing in traffic. However, I don't have good enough stat software on that site to see if the article readers travel to the rest of the site.

Drives me crazy when directory owners simply post keyword based RSS feeds into topics thinking that will help their SEO. The articles are often unrelated to the category and just look desperate.

What I find interesting is when we discuss adding content that hardly anyone mentions category descriptions.

I also like to discover those hidden gems on the net. Those great sites that languish in the 100, 200 or even 300s of the SERPs simply because the site owner does not understand how to promote their site. While there are far more junk sites, many of the original free hosted websites (think GeoCitites and similar) have wonderfully, informative sites by folks who are more interested in sharing knowledge than making a quick buck.

 

YMC - I skipped mentioning descrips because I've been prepping a blog on that topic for later this week and I hate to forecast it ahead of time, but suffice it to say you're dead right, and many sent to directories are best scrapped and re-written for the sake of the site owner.

Agree about those "hidden gems"
That's what I meant about "hobby" type labor-of-love sites. I've seen some free-hosted stuff that's just remarkable and deserves a look. One of my alltime favorites (think they moved to a paid host since) was a model train site where the guy invested years creating a miniature world. After hordes of MFAs it's nice to find highly original content, and sharing 'em with others makes editing fun.

 

I've tried just about everything with my directories and found that the fluff, the extras, the blogs, the content is pretty much useless. Its way too time consuming too. No one comes to my directories to use them as "Portals", or to get news, or other useless info. They come there to search or list sites. They end up there more often than night by means of a simple SE query.

 

www.romow.com is a successful portal directory IMO. I believer they got decent traffic from their contents.