Regardless of your level of experience in the Geek Business world, you are likely to have heard of directories and you are likely to have formed an opinion of them. It seems the normal route of progression of directory opinion is: 1. gung ho to get listings in every directory; 2. directory listings are not worth anything; 3. some directories are must haves.
My opinion is along the lines of #3. I feel that there are several directories that you should be listed in. I also feel that there are niche directories that are worth the effort to get a listing in. And finally, I find that most directories are a waste of time. That does not mean I won’t take a link in a directory because it is in my waste of time list… it just means that I won’t spend valuable time going after it.
Must Have Directories:
Yahoo - in my opinion the grand daddy of all directories. Despite the Yahoo/Bing search merger, I still feel that Yahoo is a worthy directory to be in. It is expensive (if you are watching all expenses), but it seems to be a nice trigger to Google and Bing that your website is for real.
BOTW - Best of the Web is an old, human edited directory. It is less expensive than Yahoo, but I find that it too acts as a kind of trigger to the search engines as to the seriousness of your website.
DMOZ - I hesitate to list this here as I find the directory to generally be a waste of time. However, there are still a significant number of people who think that DMOZ is worthwhile. It is free to submit to. It is human edited. I find that the time between submission and inclusion can be short (under a week) to ridiculous (over a year). To me, that makes the directory irrelevant. But others are far more forgiving.
Niche Directories:
This list will vary based on your niche. Just a small bit of research will get you a nice list. Think about industry resources when looking for niche directories
To me, the key about deciding whether to be in other directories comes down to the appearance and traffic of the directory. If it looks nice and it has reasonable traffic, I might submit a link request. If the sites is utterly unappealing, I see no reason to think the other users will actually use it and follow a link to my site.
