Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Registering with Directories

Directories are searchable site listings with a difference: humans, not programs, create them. That means a small army of workers painstakingly puts together a collection of sites, neatly sorted into categories. The advantage of directories is that they’re well-organized. A couple of clicks can get you a complete list of California’s regional newspapers, for example. The unquestioned disadvantage is that directories are dramatically smaller than full-text search catalogs. That means directories aren’t very useful for those in search of a piece of elusive information that doesn’t easily fall into a category, like a list of the English language’s most commonly misspelled words. Over the years, as the Web has ballooned in size, directories have become increasingly marginalized, and full-text search tools like Google and Yahoo have become the most common way that people hunt for information.

So, given that directories are just the unattractive cousins of full-text search engines, why do you need to worry about them? Two reasons. First, some web visitors still use directories, even if they don’t use them as often as they do full-text search engines. And second, some search engines (including Google) pay attention to directory listings, and tend to rank sites higher if they turn up in certain directories. Getting into the right directories can help you start to move up the results list in a full-text search. And just like college, getting into a directory requires ...