If you are operating a website, your prime goal will be to increase its online visibility. You will want more and more traffic to your website which will eventually increase the popularity of your site. For this purpose, you need to register to a web directory first so that you are picked up by a search engine and start attracting visitors in your site.
Web directories serve as a list or catalogue of numerous links that are sorted by specific topics. Before search engines came into the scene, directories were the main way to find relevant sites. Web directories are lists of web pages according to categories. The web sites listed have reviews about their contents with the name and link of their site. You can find a category and then navigate to sites listed in that category. On the other hand, search engines use key words or phrases to find out websites. The search is done on the titles, names, contents and sometimes in the inner pages depending on the type of search engine. The result is listed and you get many web sites' links to get going with. Web directories and search engines are terms with confusing elements. Web directories are normally run by people not computers and they do the review and the categorization before listing the site in the directory. The categorization is done after seeing the whole pages; it's not done using a few key words. A site is usually included in one category only. Search engines are run by computer programs. They use crawler like programs to visit web sites and the pages within the sites. The results are then listed and presented to the surfer. It works on key words or phrases that can be included in any part of the web site. Directories offer one way links which is related with only your sites. Search engine appreciates one way link than reciprocal links (links that are exchanged with other sites). Directories can help you out in this way too.
Search engines use crawlers or spiders to search for new and useful websites. A spider reads a website, goes into different links placed in that site and reports to the search engine about that site. It also returns in those sites to see the changes in those. A directory helps in this process of placing numerous sites in your site. So, let a search engine find your website through the links in various directories and that is the best option to announce your existence to a search engine. If you want to get your web site listed in the web directories, you need to go through certain procedures. You have to submit your site's name and other data in order to get your site listed. The editors of the web directories will go through your site, categorize it, write reviews about it and lastly list in the directory with the review. There are many types of submission as some are free and some are paid submission. But in the case of search engines, there's no need to submit the site to the search engines.
The web directories provide a lot of traffic to the sites. The reason behind submission to the directories is to increase the traffic to the sites. People get their site listed in paid or free directories in order to get better traffic.