Just a bit about search engine optimization.

Way back in the mid 90′s, a little something called the Internet was being born and released to the masses. This was an age of old, dinosaur technologies, where CRT monitors were all that existed to display the very basic and rudimentary web pages that the web comprised of back in these early days. This was the age before search engines as we know them today existed, and the method people used to find the information they needed on the web (if it existed, which was real iffy back then) was through page directories.

There were several directories back in these stone age days, but there were two that really stood out and became the largest and most well known directories of the time: Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project. Yahoo actually coupled their directory with a search engine of sorts, though it (and others like it) didn’t actually search the net as search engines do today: instead, it simply looked around in the directory it was told to, and displayed the most relevant results from there. If it was not in the directory, the search engine could never know about it.

For several years directories enjoyed the status of the “go to guys” of the web. This was not to last, sadly, as some forward thinkers saw the potential limits of directories and how these would become more apparent as the Internet grew exponentially over the years. These forward thinkers happened to work at a small company called Google, and they developed what would become the most widely used search engine on the planet. Other search engines appeared following Google’s lead, and it seemed that directories would soon become a thing of the past. Directories have managed to hang on, however.

The reason directories are still used and useful is because they have one thing over algorithm-based results that modern search engines employ. What is this advantage? It is quite simple, really: where the majority of search engine results are largely automated, directory listings are still created and modified by real people. Every page on the directory has been looked at and reviewed by a real person (or persons), which means in most cases that the pages themselves are qualitatively judged instead of quantitatively ranked based on keyword density, meaning that it is impossible for people to easily trick directories into listing or promoting their pages.

Websites are continuously added to these directories by owners for several reasons, but one may surprise you. A page being listed on a directory will rise in the ranks of search engine results because of that listing. As a lot of focus right now is on rising to the top of search engine results, directories ultimately benefit from the way search engines rank pages.

It is thanks to these two advantages that directories remain today, and why they are not likely to go extinct for several years to come.

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