Every online business needs traffic, and majority of the websites get major fraction of there traffic from search engines. Traffic from search engines increases directly with increase in visibility of a website on the web. Visibility of any site increases from the incoming links from pages that are regularly visited by the search engines bots. One among the many options to increase the visibility of any site is to submit your site to good web directories. Now the question comes how you do judge the directory as good or bad? Do you judge them from free or paid point of view or do you judge them from Page Rank point of view? There are many webmasters who go about judging a directory based on the Google Page Rank. This is also not the very correct way to judge the things as Google updates the Toolbar Page Rank once every quarter and so many new web directories need at least 6 months to see the good handsome toolbar page rank as many wait for the first page rank update as where they stand and then when they don’t get anywhere they start effectively on link building for page rank. Many thinks if the directory is paid then its worth always submitting but if you can just have the below mentioned points in the back of your mind it will just not be easy for you to judge the directory in an effective way but if you plan to start a web directory it will help you keep the things under control as to what any webmaster visiting your web directory for submission is looking for? The below mentioned points will guide you in making the decision as to what is the deciding factor for me to submit my site or not. Just bookmark it for future use or its just not worth going about seeing further. 1. Check out if the directory is indexed in major search engines. Try searching with the following terms in the search engines without quotes “site:]www.directory-name.com†2. After you check that site have some pages in the search engine cache try looking at the date when was the home page cached. Its good if Google caches the page every 15 days as that suggest its updated regularly and the directory is live and active. 3. Check the robots.txt file. Make sure that search engine bots are allowed to crawl the pages where you intend to put your listing. 4. Check the Meta tags to make sure that search engine spiders are not prevented from following links in it. A Meta tag with noindex or nofollow will not be indexed or spidered and links in that page are not followed by bots. 5. Check the source code of the links that are already there and check if they don’t put rel=â€nofollow†in the links. If its there check if there is an option of removing it. There are directories who put rel=â€nofollow†tags for normal links but for reciprocal links they just remove it. 6. Above mentioned points are necessary when you target search engines benefit from the directory but if directory itself can provide you some good amount of traffic then just submit it without having any benefit from the search engines. 7. Check if there is appropriate category for your site and if its there check if your sites similar themes are already there. I don’t mean your competitors but say if your site is related to web design then there are sites related to web design in the very same category. If there are no sites bookmark it and wait for some time probably a week or two and check it later to see if some sites are added. This will also help you to realize that there is some activity with the directory and it’s live and performing. 8. Check to see if Yahoo shows back-links to the page you wish your site to appear on. I suggest Yahoo and not Google for a simple reason that Google does not show all the back-links and the link: command in Google is very confusing for the new webmasters. 9. Check to see the age of the domain. Go for the Expiry date of the domain as the judging factor to know the age of the domain rather than when it was registered because that can lead to misconception for 2 reason a. It can be re-sale one having created date as the older than the actual age of the directory b. It can be a renewed domain where the Actual date is newer than the actual age of the directory. 10. Check if the directory consists of too many empty categories. If its there bookmark it for future reference and see if there are some activity and some submission in the directory on a weekly or monthly basis 11. Check if the contact information is available on the site. Try contacting them but don’t expect very fast reply as webmasters are always busy but yes definitely expect a reply. 12. Never check the Alexa rank of the directory and make any decisions based on that. It can be always tweaked by installing it by couple of people and reloading the page over and over again. 13. Try reading the submission guidelines at submit / Add page. It almost specifies whether your site qualifies for the directory or not. 14. Check if the directory provides search engine friendly urls. Watch out for dynamic urls. Sometimes search engines find it difficult indexing or recognizing dynamic urls with too many parameters. 15. Last but the most important factor is to check whether category pages have too many outgoing links. If your link is one of 100+ links on a single page, visitors as well as bots will find it difficult to locate your site. If bots even locate your site then the amount of importance given to your link will not be worth submitting. We are offering here today our services submitting your article to article directories Articles are a great way to increase backlinks to your site and that means more benefits to your search engine positions and thus generate traffic. Interested Clients Please PM me details Thanks Regards, Elites Webservices Pvt Ltd