The search for back links to your sites is never ending and looking out for quality web directories is a big part of that.

www.urldir.org is a new family friendly and human edited general SEO web directory that has been added to the general directories category in our SEO resources directory. You have to pay for listings (currently $20 for a featured listing which includes 7 extra links) but if you are serious about promoting your site, this is a good thing. Requiring a fee tends to discourage submissions from spammy sites, so you know your site is going to be listed alongside other good quality sites.

Another great feature of UrlDir.org is the large description limit of 750 characters. Writing a detailed description will encourage people browsing the directory to visit your site and improve the quality of the back link. (Search engines look at the text around a link to help determine it’s relevance.)

The directory isn’t showing any toolbar PageRank yet, but with over a thousand backlinks that is sure to change at the next update. The home page and internal pages have been recently cached by Google though, which means the link to your site would be found.

One of the first sites to take up a featured listing in our resource directory is mainsearches.com, a SEO Web Directory.

It is a well designed and well-organised general directory (like DMOZ and BOTW) with a large number of categories where you can submit sites. It offers regular, featured and reciprocal listing options (with extra deep links) and is also human edited and reviewed.

With thousands of web directories of varying quality to choose from, how do you decide which ones are worth spending money on? And, even if they are free, submitting your site takes time which we are all short of.

There are a number of things to look for in a quality web directory:

• Are the links it provides search engine friendly?
• Does it have PageRank?
• Are it’s internal pages cached by Google?
• Are the sites already listed of good quality and well categorised?
• Does it offer extra links?

These factors indicate that the link you get from a directory is worth it and of good quality - mainsearches.com meets all of these criteria and offers pretty good value too at $8.99 (price at time of writing) for a regular listing with 5 extra links .