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Human edited SEO (Search Engine Optimized) friendly web directories are becoming very popular among webmasters to get some much needed backlinks which are so important for websites to improve their ranking on search engines. On the other hand, internet surfers are finding it convenient to find their required web resources by browsing through these attractive looking and sophisticated local search engines.

Web directories are of two types in general – Paid Directories and Free Directories. Besides they can also be categorized into general and niche category directories. General directories contain all the categories in general and are quite large. On the other hand niche directories list web resources that fall into a particular category – for example Business, Webmasters, Hosting, Blog or Blogging etc.

The Directory industry has come a long way since the establishment of DMOZ or ODP (Open Directory Project) in 1999. Since then hundreds of directories have come up and most of them are run by entrepreneurial webmasters who run these directories. With web-hosting becoming cheap, webmasters can easily provide links to webmasters and localized quality search results to the surfers.

Normally, it is seen that Paid directories (directories which offer listing for a fee) are very strong and very widely promoted. Naturally, listing in them helps a lot for the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Page) of websites as most of these directories rank very high themselves in SERPs.

There are lots of high quality Free Directories too. These directories can earn a lot of revenue by way of attracting huge traffic and therefore Google’s AdSense and other PPC advertisements are very good earning avenues for them. They can also sell preferential advertising spaces by way of banner space sale, featured listing and footer or site-wide and other premiere ad-space sales.

These days there is another group of Information web directories which are coming up to provide internet surfers a targetted experienced that makes their searching job much more easier. They are the Niche Directories which cater to specific fields such as Shopping Web Directory - to cater to shopping websites, Travel Web Directory to cater to travel related websites and many more. This targetted genre of web directories give a whole new experience to surfers and makes search engine optimization for niche sites more easier.

The growth of the directory industry has led to the development of an ancillary industry revolving around it that is facilitating good income for many individuals and SEO companies by way of directory submission service. As webmasters are busy creating quality contents for their sites, they find it convenient to hire professionals to submit their sites to directories for link building which is win-win for both webmasters and professional directory submitters or submission services. Most of these trades take place on big webmasters forum like Digital point, Site point, V7N etc.