If your website is new or lacks visitors you will be keen to increase your website traffic so one way is to submit your url to directories.

Directories drive traffic in 2 ways: natural visitor traffic and search engine traffic.

The natural visitor traffic comes from people finding your site listed in the directory and clicking on the link. They may even get to your site via finding the directory listing in a search engine. This is because the directory page may have more authority than your own site.

Search engine traffic comes after your site is found from a link on the directory page by a search engine robot. This inbound link will help boost your ranking in search engines. The better the quality of the link the more ranking benefit you get from the link. Link quality will depend on factors such as relevance of the anchor text, the relevance of the page where the link is and the authority of the site sending the link.

The worst kind of inbound link is one tagged with “rel=nofollow”, this instructs search engines to convey no ranking benefits to the other site! This tag was introduced by Google to help combat comment spam in blogs where the links in a comment provided inbound links to the sites of spammers. But many bloggers are removing this tag from comments since it is a deterrent for legitimate commentators to post.