Web directories have guided the internet almost since the day it was born. Search engines are amazing in these modern times, but they still cannot read or categorize our websites effectively. Therefore, the only option is to manually register your website with a bunch of website directories that contain categories for your website. They have categories based on what the author thought was relevant. You should always respect this because if he only wanted to create a directory for arts and crafts, obviously, my site wouldn’t be a good fit for his directory.
It is important to understand that there are thousands if not millions of website directories. I can tell you right here and now that there is no good reason that you would need to submit to more than 100 high quality directories. Don’t list your sites if the directories don’t provide a form of organization like categories because this will actually hurt your search engine ratings. Google will look at that directory and see a ton of unrelated sites, which will immediately tell Google, “Hey, this is a link farm.” Upon finding things like this, Google and other search engines give you a lower score in their algorithms.
DMOZ Directory
I am proud to say after a good long battle of trying to get in the Open Directory Project, After Hours Programming finally has an entry. Yes, it is quite rewarding, but DMOZ has lost a lot of credit to search engines like Google over the years. Google does use DMOZ to help create descriptions and a few other things, but it is not nearly as powerful of a link as it used to be. It might be a bit soon to say this, but DMOZ’s PageRank is not any more powerful than another high PageRank. Matt Cutt’s (the Google Guy) has even discussed how Google uses DMOZ. So, if you can’t get in, it isn’t the end of the world. However, don’t stop trying though because it is still a pretty cool feeling.
Web Directories
Below is a current list of great web directories that allow you to provide information about your website and not just the url.