Which directories are seo friendly | How to Find?

Recently while working for a Popular Ratings and Reviews site I learned a lot about various types of Web Directories out there. I had to find and analyze various local business listing sites and industry-specific directories. If you are an SEO or a webmaster with some idea about Internet Marketing you would know two things for sure: –

Every so-called internet marketer would tell you directory submission will help you boost your search engine ranking.
Every expert SEO will tell you Directory submissions are a waste of time and only a couple of them are worth the time.

So it becomes mind-boggling for newbie promoters to decide what to do with Directory Submissions. The latest trend is SEO friendly Web directories. When you say ‘latest trend’ that means a lot of people are now starting to mention the term without even knowing what makes a Directory SEO friendly.

So I thought I would share my thoughts with my readers on this subject –

How to find if a directory is SEO Friendly?

I am going to be brief. So I am listing down my thoughts as points.

The Directory should provide a direct dofollow link. No javascript window.open or server-side redirects. Well we can accept 301 redirects to some extent.
Your Listing page should be indexed regularly and therefore should be easily reachable for the search engines. It would be really awesome if your listing can be reached from the home page in 3-4 clicks.
The site should have an aggressive linking structure. You should be linked from the category/subcategory/locality / tag pages which generally attract the maximum visits and carry the most weight in terms of authority and Page Rank.
Page Rank of the Directory does matter whatever other suggestion you might have heard. Make sure not just the Home page the category pages have good PR. Anything above 4 is welcome. But remember that the PR is on a logarithmic scale so the difference between PR5 and PR6 is exponentially higher than the difference between PR4 and PR5.
Pagination is a major woe. Some of the directories have thousands of results to be displayed for a single search or category. In that case, they have to break the results into pages and display them separately. Now your job is to make sure these subpages are indexed as well.
Check the directory’s domain authority and the page authority of some of its most popular category pages. That should give you an idea of the value it holds for you.
Finally, make sure the directory is popular. It should have decent monthly traffic and should be useful to the visitors. You may try some traffic crunching services like compete or alexa.

I hope that helps you in some way of other in finding a proper SEO friendly web directory.