Links to other sites is one of the most important factor for any website or blogs to rank well in search engines. Ranking well in search engines means traffic to you sites. There are many ways to exchange links to other websites and one of them is including a directory in your websites so you can place the links. The reason is, it will not be search engine friendly for your website is you will just put any kind of links in just one page. You have to categorize them. Creating many categories and updating them is really a pain if you will just use a website editor and not automate them.
