I have been doing a good deal of research lately into web directories and it is time to put that research into practice.  My question is what is the value of submitting one’s site to web directories.  Note, I am not referring to the 10 - 20 largest web directories (such as Yahoo, DMOZ and business.com), but rather the myriad number of smaller, less known web directories.  Do these directories send targeted traffic in and of themselves?  Do they help with search engine rankings?  And, supposing that the answer to either of these questions is yes, do they help enough to be worth the time and/or money involved in submitting one’s site to these directories? 

As such, I want to run a little experiment to try and determine the value of submitting one’s site to these web directories.  I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I will be running this experiment, I have merely made the decision to test the value of submitting one’s website to large numbers of web directories.  Furthermore, as you can see, I have decided to make this a bit of a “public” experiment.  I’m open to ideas and suggestions as to how to best go about determining this.  At the same time I plan to share my own thoughts about how to best run this experiment. 

My goal is to have this experiment be a running thread on SEMBasics until I come up with some sort of answer.  I figure that in addition to finding out an answer to our initial question (or questions), it is also worthwhile learning how one attempts to find out information one doesn’t know.  Given that the web is a rather dynamic place, it is an important to know how to figure out questions such as these.  With that said, let the great web directories experiment begin…

Articles in this series:

• Initial (pre Web directories experiment) findings
• Finding a good list of web directories