Directories serve two purposes in your web development efforts.

One, a link from a directory is counted as a back link and hence increases your link popularity. Two, some directories

will send you targeted traffic.



Webmasters who use directories for increasing link popularity

should check out the directory first to see if the directory

is SE friendly or not as, only a SE friendly directory will

give value for their links.



So, how do you detect a SE friendly directory? Here are some

tips, which will help you do so.



1) Check the url format of the directory. Some directories

have urls in the format http://sitename//index.php?id=1&c=10...

for their category pages. This is called a dynamic link and

search engines find it difficult to crawl such pages.



Urls for the category pages should be in a static format.

Example : http://www.indexbizz.com/cat1.html . Search engines

can easily crawl such pages and your link will also get crawled.



2) Your link should not be a JavaScript link. Some directories

use JavaScript to jump to your site from their category pages.

Search engines find it difficult to crawl such links.



3) The directory must not ban search engine robots from crawling

the category pages. You can check whether such a condition exists

or not by looking at the robots.txt file of the directory. This

file is located at the root level of the directory. To see this

file just type robots.txt after the domain name of the directory.

Find out what this file is saying, for example -



User-agent: *

Disallow:

This will allow all SE bots to all the folders and files in the

directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

This will keep all SE bots away from all files/ folders in the

directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /mydirectory/

This will keep away all SE bots from crawling the 'mydirectory'

directory and all files under it.

So be wise in your selection of SE friendly directories, and put

your efforts towards getting links from such directories that

fulfill the above conditions.





About the author:

Osan Mundae writes for http://www.indexbizz.com/