Do web directories help?

As part of my new offerings to my blog, I am including different topics that I will be posting about weekly. One of them is learning how to blog for money and getting traffic to your blog/site.

SEO and Web Directories
I'm sure that everyone has come across a Web Directory at one time or another. If you don't know what exactly a Web Directory is, they are not search engines, but basically a big catalog of websites that is edited and managed by people. By submitting your website to a web directory, you can help you boost your search engine visibility. Sounds like a great deal, right? Maybe. But like anything else online, directories range from quality to a waste of time.

How does a web directory help you improve your search engine rankings? How are they different from a regular search engine? It is very important to understand how they work. Directories have databases full of websites and a search field where you can enter phrases-just like a search engine would, but they are so different in every way else.

Search engines have robots or "spiders" to find websites and add them to the search engine's database. In a directory, human editors find websites and screen them for quality and relevance before adding them to the directory's database.The human review process is the main factor between a web directory and a search engine.

Take Yahoo for instances. They are partly a directory. Look at the directory portion of Yahoo. This system is used to organize websites into categories and sub-categories, and is done by humans to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. Business.com is similar in how they run too.

So, how do Web Directories Help Your Search Engine Ranking?
What is the connection between a business web directory and SEO? One benefit of listing your website in a web directory is that people can find your site when they search there. Another is that Google will rank you high because when you are listed in the directory, you gain a one-way link to your website. This helps to increase back linking, which in turn helps to boost your search engine visibility.

My favorite is Yahoo, because it is a high-quality directory and can help you score more "points" with a search engine like Google. Since Web Directories use human editors— not a robotic crawler — it tells the search engine that your website has some degree of quality, legitimacy and relevance.