Submitting your blog/website to search engine friendly directories is useful in boosting sites ranking, and also considered as one of the most effective method on how to increase traffic to your site.

Here are some measures to know if the directory is search engine friendly or not

1. Links are crawlable and indexable by search engines

• Check if the directory has rel=”no-follow” tag (used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.)
• Also try to check if the directory pages were cached by Google, Yahoo and MSN (type “site:www.directorysiteurl.com” in search engine search bar).

2. Links should be categorized properly.

Always see to it the links on the directory was categorized properly.

Once the directory complies on the guidelines i mentioned above, then it’s search engine friendly. I know that most of high page rank (PR) directories are not free, pay for inclusion in this case. But there are still free search engine friendly directories, as a matter of fact;

addlinksuggest.com
all-linkdirectory.com
am-autobody.com
amusingnotions.com
amwart.com
askdrknow.com
beatribe.com
bestdirectorysites.com
bigguide.net
blogdough.comdirectory
borisdiawblog.com
buzz-directory.com
casino-directory4u.com
choice500domains.com
crazyleafdesign.comwebdirectory
dental-plan-providers.comResources
dir.digital-photo-secrets.net
directoryfire.com