SmallBusinessNewz

You have probably heard that relevant links help get you search engine rankings. You may have also heard that submitting your site to a bunch of directories is a good way to build such links.

There are a ton of directories out there ready to be submitted to. Some will list you for free, some will charge you a fee, some will require reciprocal links, and some will offer combinations of these options.

Many of them however, offer automatically approved listings - meaning that all you have to do is submit your site and it will get listed. Which means anyone else can do the same thing. Which means that there is a good chance that your site will end up among a slew of spammy and just plain poor-quality sites.

Then there are some that are human-edited. This means that there is a person or group of people going through every link that is submitted and controlling the quality of the listings that get in. When listings are human approved, there is a much better chance that the internal pages of that directory will list sites that are truly relevant to each other.

Don't you think search engines would value a link that is listed among other quality links higher than one that is listed with a bunch of spammy ones?

With an automatically approved directory, you're relying on everybody else that submits to stay relevant to the category they are submitting to. With a human-edited one, you are relying on the person that is running the site, whose best interest is probably to keep the categories full of relevant links. See the difference?
Directories like DMOZ, 19Planets.com, and of course our Small Business Directory are human-edited and will keep your links in better company than the average run-of-the-mill directory. Plus they're free. But you better submit a quality relevant link to them, or chances are you won't get accepted.

There are many other human-edited directories out there as well waiting for you to find them, both paid and free. Please feel free to share more free human-edited directories that you know of with the rest of us.