Internet has invaded into many households thereby reducing world to a global village. Now you can explore the world, gain knowledge, get updated about events and even shop, right from your computer with click of a mouse.

Webmasters have realized the potential of internet in bringing them business and traffic. Significance of Web Directories in presenting visitors with vast resource of diversified sites remains undisputed. Serving organized lists of various web sites, web directories are seen as a mini search portal where you can find more than one site from different webmasters though dwelling upon similar core concept or theme. Advent of page ranking concept resulted in many webmasters submitting their sites in the web directories. Adding web site links in Web Directories is now seen as a vital search engine optimization strategy. Web Directories also serve as a resource for visitors presenting them with different site links for the theme they search.

Webmasters are also coming up with web sites that offer a broad array of resources and services, such as forums, chat boards, e-mails, search engines, shopping carts and much more. Such web sites with broader array of services are referred to, as Web Portals. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, providing access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to secure their user database and survive in the competitive market. Web Portals in mid-1990s used to be starting point of Web browsers and thus gained a lot of attention, with most of them starting as web directory or search engines. Even though many old players lost during dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001, few like yahoo remain popular till date. Web Portals work as single resource site to use multitude of services or features, thereby saving visitor’s time and efforts. Web Portals have diversified into Government portals, entertainment portals, environmental portals, business portals, corporate portals, investment portal and lots more, with each portal catering to needs of its user/visitor base. Business portals are designed to be able to work on multiple platforms and share collaboration in workplaces. With ability to provide many resources under one roof, Web Portals are again catching up to achieve their pre-bubble burst glory.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Web Directories, Web Portals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.