A guide to the web directory Search Engine Friendliness

There is no incentive for people to submit their web sites to the web directory, unless it is SEF directory. Why is that so? Really? How one can make a SE friendly directory? What are the criteria of SE friendliness? That many questions arise when someone mentions SE friendliness. This chapter’s goal is to answer these questions and to provide a comprehensive guide of directory SE friendliness.

The definition of Search Engine Friendly web directory

What does the SEF directory mean? The main criterion of a «Search Engine Friendly» directory is that all links in such directory are direct links and can be easily crawled by search engine spiders. It means that search engine robots scan pages and links on them can be cached and assigned a page rank. That is why such a directory is called a SEF directory.

SEF directories are helpful

Why SE friendliness is the only incentive for people to submit their websites to a directory? It is so because SEF directories are useful in promoting websites. SEF web directory improves Page Rank of the websites listed and that is exactly what all people want from them. Every directory wants to get a lot of submissions and that is why webmasters have to create only SEF directories.

The criteria of SEF web directory

The definition gives a worthy notion though in order to create a SEF directory one needs to know the specific information. What are the criteria of the SEF web directory? According to the experienced web masters there is a number of dos and don’ts that make up such a directory. These are the criteria:

SEF directory does not: SEF directory does:

• Use Redirects

• Use no index, no follow tags

• Have too many links on one page

• Prevent directory pages with robots.txt

• Put listings too deep for a single category

• Make the links look readable as static links

• Use plain HTML < a href > links

• Put links with meaningful anchor text

• Use Mod rewrite

• Use sitemap

These are the basic criteria that make a directory SE Friendly. Let’s take a closer look at each item from the list.

Don’ts

The first item of the Don’ts list is redirect links. SEF directories never put their listing in the form of redirects. Redirects are not counted as back links and that is why they don’t give any Page Rank to the listed links. In such a way they are worthless to people. If it is so bad why directory webmasters do so? Redirects are used by webmasters primarily for two reasons. First is that redirects enable to count the statistics of the link, e.g. the number of clicks. The second reason is that the owners of the directory want to prevent their page’s PR be donated to other links. It is a kind of dishonest policy in respect to their submitters. Never use redirects, use only direct links.

Next item that should never be on the SEF directory is Nofollow, noindex tags. They are used for the same reason as redirects – to preserve the PR of a directory. These tags prevent robots to crawl the pages and they cannot spider links on them. But nowadays it has become pretty easy to check if a directory uses these tags for its links. It can be done with the help of Firefox and Mozilla toolbar. That is why never use these tags for the listed links unless you want to lose your reputation.

What all SEF directories consider is that if the link is put very far from the directory’s home page then the chances that it will be indexed are minimal. As soon as people realize that their links are buried too deep in the directory they give up submitting to it.

Another don’t is when directory has too many links on one page. The Page Rank is being distributed among all of the links listed and the value assigned to each link is reduced to naught. That is why the optimum number of the links on one page is about 30 maximum. If you adhere to that policy your clients will appreciate it.

Dos:

Now let’s see what directory should have in order to be considered as a SEF directory.

First thing that should be mentioned is mod rewrite. Mod rewrite makes a dynamic link to be rewritten in a static form and therefore makes the link searchable. The same purpose has the site map. Map is believed to help the users as well as the search machine robots to easily navigate the web site and thus find the information quickly. That improves the chances that the link listed will be found and indexed.

There is a strong recommendation to put links with a meaningful anchor text. What does that mean? It means that instead of using “Click here†or “Read more†insert keywords of the web site, e.g. “More about Web Directory Scriptâ€. In that kind of anchor text you can incorporate direct link, e.g. “More about <a href="page.html">Web Directory Script</a>â€. That is going to be the best SEO friendly linking.

This is all criteria that should be taken into account creating a premium SEF directory. That is very important because SE friendliness guarantees that your web directory wins the reputation and consequently many other privileges and perspectives.

How to make a SEF directory

Checking all the listed SEF criteria, tuning them in your directory policy and making them work, can be a hard task, but possible. As one of the solutions to make a SEO friendly directory is eSyndiCat SEO friendly Web Directory Script. The script has all the SEF criteria set as a default. There is the facility to include more information about the link, its statistics, good anchor text. ESyndiCat web directory script uses mod_rewrite module for URL transformations and it is indexed well by all main search engines. eSyndiCat programmers constantly include new effective technologies of SEO. You can choose it or you can of course think up of your own ways to provide the clients with some special SEO value. Both ways will ensure you a reputation and popularity.

And that's basically what you need to know about web directory SE friendliness, do’s and don’ts as far as to avoid mistakes from the very starting your own SEO friendly web directory. And that’s not the end of the book, the following chapter must be the most exciting because the topic sheds a light on how to make a profit on the web directory.