Seems like most every internet marketer either has or is heavily involved with one or more directories. There are often a myriad of reasons – but one reason that I’d like to focus on is sheer quality. Typically sites of little or no value and weak business models don’t account or budget for professional marketing services. As such, I find that most firms that approach me do have sites of high value… and often they are getting beat out in the search rankings by low-value spam sites. High-quality directories (read that again, there are a lot of spammy directories of which I am NOT referring to) help to weed out the spammy sites and attract attention for higher value sites.
Anyhow, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal recently notified me of a new Maryland-based website directory called Maryland Yellow. I checked it out and it appears to be using a blog-style approach and blog-managed CMS for its directory structure. It appears very new so I’m not sure how it will shake out (few listings as of yet) but with Loren behind it I’m sure it will build up quickly and prove to be a high quality directory.
There are a bunch of regional directories out there – by state, city, etc. etc. In Maryland (which is my place of work and residence) a few notable ones are:
GreatMaryland.com (seems not purely local)
Maryland.com (more of a community site)
Connect2MD.com
The last one does not appear to accept submissions, and as such they won’t get a link from me. For full disclosure, I do own the Search Maryland internet directory and I do maintain it, although probably only approving new sites once every couple of weeks (its not a high priority and hey… I’m a busy guy!).
In DC there are also:
DC Registry (I believe they may have stopped accepting submissions?)