Web directories have been a big part of the web site promotion process, link building and a way to introduce your site to the online society. The main purpose web site owners submit links along with descriptions to web directories is to get their site indexed and crawled as soon as possible, bring traffic, rank for a particular keyword depending on the anchor text chosen and gain valuable page rank.

These last SEO expectation depends greatly on the reputation each page within the web directory has. Some web directories will have an excellent page rank in their home page but the rest of the pages have little or no page rank at all so it is important to keep in mind that 'Page Rank' means just that, it is not a site-wide ranking system.

As webmasters have noticed, a good and clean web directory can gain significant page rank and authority within a short period of time. The main concern a web directory owner needs to take care of is: usability. This part of a web directory design can make a directory or brake it, because most visitors who click and navigate through directories to find what they are looking for, will not stop and try to learn how to use a complex directory. Remember that if you make it complicated, visitors will resort to more practical means such as the main search engines.

Web directory software and scripts have been widely tested to make sure they work in almost any hosting environment. As always the requirement is to have a paid hosting account with either a virtual, dedicated, sharing, VPS, etc. configuration. Free hosting accounts will sometimes work with this type of software 'if and only if' a proper PHP version and MySQL tools are installed, but since this software is often paid, it would be futile to use a free host.

The right Hosting service would have to provide features such as PHP 4.2 or above, MySQL 3.23 or higher and a compatible system such as: FreeBSD, RedHat, Windows 2003 or Fedora.

Once these requirements have been met it is necessary to have full access to an online file manager or FTP program to change certain security settings within the folders, set robot permissions, htaccess configurations (mod rewrite, etc) as well as layout and appearance configurations.

The most popular script used today by thousands of webmasters to create niche and general web directories is phpLD. Another important factor a webmaster needs consider that according to the web site's niche a certain bandwidth allowance must be allocated to this type of sites since sometimes the traffic can take administrators by surprise.

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