How to Use Directories for Web Site Promotion
By: Rich Brunelle

If you are not using Web Directories for your Web Site Promotion, you are not aware of the benefit they provide. Directories, Link Engines, and Internet Directories are not all created equal. But, if they are categorized, database driven, and the end result is publishing static HTML pages or other Search Engine Friendly documentation of your web site information, they are worth their weight in gold.

datajam's Internet offers eight different databases for Internet Users to submit their URL data to. To facilitate conversion to Search Engine Friendly data on our older databases we publish the data as HTML and Text to our web site. We decided to try a different approach for our more recent databases.

At http://djam-promo.com we have "datajam's COOL Site Index." This is a brand new database and we decided that we would select from submitted sites, a few per month to write articles about. We realize that this would not create a complete Search Engine Friendly directory. But, it will highlight those sites selected in an instantly beneficial manor. We also liked the idea of actually performing our own review of the web sites once in a while. This database does have User Review and Rating capability for Users that wish to offer their own independent assessment of web sites.

Another new database, "datajam's Internet Web Directory" is at http://promo.glwb.info . The neat thing about this database is daily rebuilding the complete directory from the data submitted to a complete HTML based site. This makes the data very Search Engine Friendly. Our test submissions to this site reflected linkage discovered by some of the major search engines within a week. We find this very impressive.

The end result we seek is positive and beneficial linkage resource for the major search engines to find relative to our Users web sites. Presently we are unsure how either of these databases will perform once laden with large amounts of data. We look forward to testing both performance and promotional results.

How is this information useful to you in regards to your web site promotion? It isn't really. But now you understand a little more about Directories. The best advice I have to offer regarding use of Directories for web site promotion is simple. If someone visits any of our database sites six months from now and searches for your product or service and your web site is not there . . . Directories are like the Phone Book. If you could afford to list your business in every phone book yellow pages throughout your state, would you? Your competition has. The same rule applies. Submit your data to as many Directories as possible.
A good test for determination of whether you should submit your data to a specific Directory is right on the form you fill out or the front page of their site: "Is the submitted data categorized?" Trust me, it matters a lot to search engines and relevant linkage. Adding your data to a jumbled list will have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings. Categorization performs relevance. Search Engines like relevance.

Any Questions . . .?


About the Author
Rich Brunelle is CC&BW for all of the "datajam's Internet" web sites. He can be contacted via email at datajam@comcast.net See datajam's Internet to visit datajam's Internet.