There is a whole lot of fuss, the last few years, about getting backlinks (links pointing) to your site. Its been argued time and time again in the webmaster forums that it helps a lot in the visibility of your site to have many and if possible to have links from quality sites. It would be even better to have links from sites that are similar in theme to yours.
The belief is that the more links you have pointing to your site, the better the position you get when one is searching for content (keywords) that is similar to what you have on your site. This belief does not seem to be far from the truth actually (nobody really knows the truth apart from the search engine engineers themselves).
Well this belief alone has led to the spawning of internet directories. The directories are not really a new kind of website - yahoo started out as an internet directory - its just that after the acceptance of backlinks as a value added to a website there is a rush of people to start their own web directories.
The web directories serve as a purpose to categorize the content of the web. In essence they put links from their web directory pointing to other websites but each link is put into its appropriate category/page. For example some directories have the "Regional" page which has links to pages such as "US" "Italy" "Germanay" and clicking lets say on "US" would take you to another page with links to websites related to US (could also have further categorization).
Web directories usually start out as free for all (FFA) to add a link (maybe in exchange for a backlink), and as they become popular they start charging the sites that want to be listed in them. For example the Yahoo Directory charges $299 a year for any site to be included in it (but lets non profit organizations to be included for free). Some directories can also have free links for all but have payed premium placement on top of the categories some of the popular ones are alive directory, site-sift, aviva directory, jayde but a could probably list another 2000 that are not that popular.
So how do you build one ?
Setting it up is probably the easiest to do, there is a bunch of scripts out, some free (indexscript, site sift listings ... ) and some charge a small fee (php Link Directory, eSyndicat ...). Setting it involves 1)getting a server to host it and 2)getting a domain name 3) installing/and configuring the script to the server. Later on when your directory becomes popular you create a paypal account and configure the script so that people are charged for inclusion.
Building it is only half of the trouble, the rest (if not more) of the trouble goes into marketing it so that it becomes popular. That is a whole different subject that I will probably write something about next time.
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1 comments:
This seems to be a smart idea. I like it. Thanks for sharing this. I'd like to share these legitimate ways to make money online, from building your own business wholesale directory to becoming a pay per click affiliate.
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