Here we present a interview with Mr. Amit Patel, who is now a well known person in the webmasters community and on various webmaster and SEO forums. He is mainly known due to his famous and strong web directory Global Internet Index which he created last year and soon turned it into a full fledged web directory with his heavy and aggressive promotions. Now it is one of the best known web directories around on the web.
Here we will have a small interview with him in which he discusses with us various aspects of the Web Directory Industry which has boomed a lot in the last few years. He shares with us his experiences in the industry and also provides some valuable tips to Directory Owners
Where did you get the idea to start a web directory ?
I have been providing seo services at our seo company to many of our clients and that was when i had seen great improvements in our rankings and i got a idea to get serious on a single web directory instead of handling many small ones. The web directory at the beginning was started as a normal phpld based directory but then slowly i started working on it in terms of serps and not backlinks.
How much time do you spend to maintain your directory roughly ?
I sped around 3-4 hours/day on an average on gii web directory to check out the latest improvements, new tweaks, adding fresh content, managing my staff to work on its content part etc and approving the latest recieved listings.
What are your future plans for GII ?
I have many plans for gii in the comming months but iam not interested right now to disclose them, but one of those is to make a web directory which offers returning traffic and means really a web directory and not just links directory which passes PR & backlinks.
What do you think it takes to make a successful web directory?
A Directory owner has to be very serious on his directory and its not always that a unique designed web directory would perform well and is worth to get listed, but a web directory should have serious efforts put into it and the results can be seen in the form of the serps.
What do you think submitters must look for besides a link, before submitting to the directory?
I would say they should look on the branding, promotions, efforts made by the respective directory owner and not just the current PR , because there are many directories which have been PR7 at a time and the next update they were PR6 which was because of lack of promotions or reinvestment. Also a important factor which the submitters must look at is the traffic the directory has, because a directory is not necessarily made for PR and backlinks but a good directory also delivers relevant and targetted traffic.
Do you think web directories are still useful and have a bright future ? Why ?
Yes, there is always a great scope for a web directory but the point is the owner should plan and innovate new unique things / features instead of just creating another quick money making web directory.
Is the Business of Web Directories still profitable? What are the pros and cons ?
This purely depends on how you plan out on your web directory , because i have seen many directory owners buying high PR backlinks and making high PR directories later on selling quick links and then completely stopping promotions of their web directories. Hence , a directory would be profitable when you plan out on how to reinvest the money in promoting your web directory instead of just planning to make quick money from it.
How much investment do you think is required to make a successful web directory ? How should the capital be spent on the directory?
A quality directory would count in unique design, unique ideas, scripts , mods, promotions etc and this would range from high xxxx$ in the beginning to low xxxxx$ in the later stage.
What you have to say about the competition among web directories ?
Currently there are many directories and each of those have something unique , hence its hard to say which one is good.I have been a fan of Alive directory for its enormous promotions , Aviva directory for its link baiting and many other popular directories, but i would suggest only one thing to them is - Dont be QBC’s
Conclusion
So we could see from the interview that Amit mainly emphasizes the fact that Web Directories must not only be seen from the SEO point of view i.e. for getting Link Juice and Page Rank or Backlinks but also must be seen as a instrument to get targetted traffic. This could come only when the directory has better SERPS or ranks high for various keywords which are infact categories of the directory so that those category pages get visits directly from the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) which finally goes to the links listed on the particular category page. This could be achived by various methods like adding content to the web directory, getting backlinks directly pointing to the category pages from relevant sites.
