Categorizing your website

If you are like me, you'd want any website of yours to be popular and get many hits. Unless it is something personal and private, I guess most people would want to share it everyone else on the internet. And what better way to do it than using a web directory?

At first, I thought web directories were some sort of search engines. It's not hard to confuse the two: both have listings of websites. The difference is, web directories categorizes their list of website by category and subcategories, whereas a search engine will display theirs by keyword. It's a minor difference, but this makes all the difference for some websites owners that are looking to increase traffic on their pages.

You probably know all about popular search engines like Google, but I'm sure you've even been on several web directories. Yahoo! Directory is a pretty well known web directory. You can see that they not only have many categories and subcategories. I remember using Yahoo! Directories back in the day - it's very useful when you want to search for websites under a specific category. It's a good tool to be used combined with search engines such as Google.

Another web directory that I only heard of quite recently is called the Open Directory Project. This one is interesting because it is maintained by a group of voluntary editors. At first when I heard of this, I didn't get how Open Directory Project correlated with its URL (dmoz.org). But upon further findings, it seems this comes from directory.mozilla.org, which is it's original domain name.

One type is website that I could think of that will benefit a lot from using web directories are businesses. Since web directories are based on categories and subcategories, this makes it so much easier for consumers to search for things they want to buy. Not only for shopping, but this also applies for businesses websites looking for clients who not necessarily are looking for consumer products.

These days I probably don't use web directories as much, but I can say that when I do need to use it, it's very helpful. You probably already know the category of something you're finding (and maybe even the subcategory), and it's just that easy! So next time when you are in need of something specific, maybe you can try out a new way of searching. Probably some people are not used to searching in web directories since search engines have sort of become the go-to for a lot of folks, but I do say that it's good to try out something new as it is good for our minds!