Achieving good search engine visibility has become a necessity for every website today. Hundreds and thousands of businesses compete with one another in order to generate more and more business through their websites. There are many ways by which a website can get high rankings in major search engines. One such important method is directory submission.

Directory submission involves submitting a particular website in general and relevant web directories. Once a website is submitted it takes anywhere between 1 day to 3 months for the website link to be added into the directory. Some of the popular web directories includes http://Dmoz.org, Yahoo directory etc. Each directory organizes its contents by categories where all the related websites get listed. To ensure that your site gets added into the directory, one must submit it in the most appropriate category otherwise it can be rejected.

A website once listed gets a one way link from the directory. This free link helps the listed site in a lot of ways. Firstly, it provides a way for search engine spiders (also known as crawlers) to find the website and index it in their own database. As soon as a site is hosted, it must be submitted in web directories so that search engine robots can crawl it. Since these robots visit directories more often than other sites, probability remains high that your site will be indexed soon. You as the owner of the site does not have to submit your site to search engines, instead they themselves come and find your site. Thus, it helps in saving a webmaster's time. Indexing is crucial for every website that wish to achieve high rankings since it's the first step for any site to ensure visibility in search engines.

Secondly, a directory placement provides the extra benefit of getting relevant traffic to your website. Since people who are actively looking for new websites and portals often visit these web directories, chances remain high that such people may also visit your site and thus provide your site free traffic. This traffic is important since it's highly pertinent. These people might also turn out to be your customers, which will boost your sales in the long run.

The most significant benefit of directory submission is increasing your link popularity, which simply is a measure of the quality and quantity of incoming links to your site. Search engines like Google, yahoo and msn provides a lot of importance to links while evaluating the rankings of a site for a particular keyword. Google for example takes into account the PR (Page Rank) of the page along with the anchor text of the link while deciding the rankings for a keyword. Gaining incoming links from high PR directories is considered an essential activity of search engine optimization (SEO).

In essence, directory submission is a central part of any SEO effort. Without submitting a site in relevant directories, one cannot hope to garner high rankings in search engines. Thus, one must definitely go for directory submissions since the time and effort is worth it.