I was thinking about what kind of links a directory owner should try to get. My view of the topic is probably not the most popular among directory owners or webmasters, but here it goes.
Most directory owners believe that they should get as many webmaster related links as possible because they are more relevant. In my opinion this is wrong, the reason is simple, a directory has two dinstinct different target audiences.
1. Directory submitters which are mainly webmasters
2. Casual Browsers
The first category is important because they are the ones that will submit their sites and provide the directory with the necessery content. They are also the ones that will purchase listings if you offer a paid submission option. However they are just a small part of what should be our overall target audience. The casual browsers are the ones that really matter. If you want to build a directory that will last in time I believe that first and foremost this is the group that you should try and target and if you manage to achieve that, then webmasters will follow, simply because you will be in a position to send traffic to their sites.
Let’s take a look at the relevancy part of my theory. In my directory I currently have about 500 categories that I am planning to expand as submissions come in. Out of those about 100 are Art related, 40 Business related etc. Only 25 of them are Internet related and not all of these categories are about webmasters. What does that mean? The way I see it it means that most of the content at my directory isn’t webmasters related and as far as I can guess the search engines judge relevancy based on content, that makes you think how relevant are webmaster related link after all.
Of course, I am not saying that webmaster related links are useless (they send the paying traffic after all) but that a link building strategy targetting a variety of links might be a better choice.
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September 6th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
You touched a soft spot, the big problem directories in general are targeting submission traffic that’s what brings the money on the short term, and not targeting visitors.
At my own directory I try to deep link build with regular sites that offer both visitors traffic and relevancy. Off curse is a more daunting task than just buy listings at other directories.
Cheers, keep the good thoughts and ideas flowing