What is SEO?

If you are thinking about starting a directory, there should be one question you as yourself - why am I bothering! This question would be more politely phrased as ‘will the benefit i gain from the directory (both cash and link value gained) be greater than I could gain by working on other sites and submitting to other directories’. In accountant speak, will you get a good ROI (return on investment).

Directory software itself is usually free or low-cost, so the main cost involved is the time that you will spend on it. Don’t be mistaken about this - directories are time-consuming, and do not run themselves.

A typical directory will be free to submit to for several months, and then become paid. Some of course remain free for ever, and others charge immediately. Even charging $1 for each entry will dramatically reduce the level of submissions you receive, so unless you can entice people by your page rank or your personal reputation you will find your directory sits there, sad and empty.

A free, well thought out, directory will receive typically 100 submissions per day. Let’s assume you spend two minutes reviewing each site submitted. That is already three hours work a day. And you haven’t started re-checking sites that were submitted earlier on, and have now been transformed from useful information providing sites into unacceptable advert covered sites. Trust me, it happens.

Now take a look at the categories that sites have been submitted into. At least 50% are submitted to top-level categories or wrong categories, and need to be moved. That’s another half an hour a day. Meanwhile you are also trying to gain backlinks and pagerank for your directory, perhaps by submitting it to other directories. More time spent.
You will find after about a month of long hours that you get much tougher on ‘poor’ submissions. I scan the free submissions at bigtangle for incorrect categories, subdomains and deeplinks submissions, rubbishy descriptions and delete them without even looking at the sites. It seems tough, but if you hope to keep control of the time you spend it is also necessary. If someone can’t take the time and trouble to submit carefully, well too bad for them.

But even so, you carry on in this way for a few months. Your income is small or non-existent (who is going to pay when they can submit free?) Eventually you think you can start charging and - boom!- no one submits anymore. Hmmm, what next?

You can keep it free, and hope for income from advertising on the site - but webmasters, who form almost all of your traffic, almost never come looking to spend money, and rarely click on adverts etc. They aren’t browsing the internet, they are looking to submit a link and leave, as quickly as possible.

Or you can keep it paid, keep publicising it and adding it to other directories, and sit back and wait for the pagerank and popularity to slowly arrive. This is the more common option, although I understand that a lot of directories are simply abandoned en-route.

With bigtangle I am currently trying a halfway approach - a very limited number of quality submissions are accepted free each week, a reasonable number of ‘reciprocal’ entries are accepted, and other entries are paid. So we have reached a point where it doesn’t take too much time to administer, we gain a little from the reciprocal links, but we don’t earn very much cash.

But this directory, like so many, is hoping and expecting great things in the future - we have several hundred inbound links and we are optimistic that within a few months it will have the pagerank to entice people to make more paid submissions. It is at that stage, probably a year after starting the directory, that we can expect to actually make a decent return on investment for the time spent on the directory.

Summary: I am optimistic that directories are useful, and can make money, but they do involve a large amount of upfront investment in time and effort. Be prepared!