Online marketing is a task for website owners. Its main goal is to generate demand or at least increase the traffic of their website. This is one of the main reasons why web directories have come to exist. Website owners need to increase their visibility on the World Wide Web for their website to be considered successful or simply to serve their purpose. However, with the emergence of alternative marketing strategies for online content, it is now not enough to know that their websites are included in web directories. One needs to know the specific advantages especially with the amount of time and money involved.

With the emergence of restructured search engines, website owners have become skeptical of the role of web directories. Many believe that they have grown to be obsolete and that internet users prefer not to make use of them anymore. In truth, web directories are still very effective as online marketing tools.

Before the popularity of search engines, web directories served as a very useful tool in finding information on the internet. As search engines grew to become fully developed and fully functional, many internet users have switched and web directories grew less and less popular. This is a fact that web directory developers do not deny. However, one other fact remains. Search engine databases are built by automated machines that also use web directories to locate website and gather keywords from their pages before including them in their search database. Since sites listed in web directories have already been screened by professional editors, search engines are programmed to value these listings. Web directories are considered by search engine developers to be sources of valuable and trustworthy information. Therefore, being listed in web directories increases the probability of being popular in search engine results. For this reason alone, online marketers should value the role of web directories in terms of finding means to increase their SERP (search engine results pages) ranking.

There is no real proof that web directories are now obsolete. Maybe it is true that internet users do not make use of web directories anymore. However, those who conclude that there is no point in getting their websites listed in web directories because of this must think again. It may be true that websites hardly generate traffic directly from web directories in which they are listed. However, this does not mean that their entry submissions prove to be useless. The software designed to track websites for the purpose of indexing their content will continuously make use of web directories. Therefore, the more web directories a site is listed in, the more often it will turn up in search engine queries.