WordPress Directory Plugin

If you are using WordPress and you are interested in creating a link directory, you might consider using a WordPress Directory Plugin. Not sure why you’d want a link directory? Well…

A link directory enables you to offer a very targeted set of categorized links on your site, preferably to content related to the theme of your site. For example, the directory on my site is for web development. So all the links in the directory should be related to web development in some meaningful way.

There’s another bonus to creating a link directory: It improves your Page Rank (PR). Page Rank is something Google uses and it’s related to the number of inbound links to your site. There’s a huge algorithm for calculating PR, but for the purposes of this article, you basically want to increase the number of people linking to your site, and a link directory helps you do this by requiring that anyone who lists themselves in your directory provide a link back to your site.

So here are two WordPress Directory Plugins worth checking out:

WordPress Links Directory
I like this directory plugin because it offers a nice, clean layout. I’m also partial to the AJAX aspects of the plugin. The install was not easy, and required some modifications to some of the files in order to get it to display correctly for the theme I’m using. It seems many people have had trouble integrating this plugin with their theme, so you may not want to use it for this reason. However, the author of the plugin has added some common theme support here. This plugin supports SE-friendly permalinks, subcategories, and reciprocal-link checking, which is a major bonus. One click on the backend sends out a little spider to see if the people who say they are linking to you are really linking to you. This is dynamite for when you have a lot of links, so you don’t have to waste your time manually checking them.

WP-Directory
I decided not to go with this plugin, but it’s still worth considering. It’s set up is more like DMOZ, so if you like that style, this may be the choice for you. It also supports pretty permalinks, screenshots, subcategories, and a cool little sidebar widget. The installation looks a lot simpler too. View a demo of WP-Directory here.

If you need help installing either of these plugins, please contact me.