There are hundreds of directories on the Web that cover every possible market, offering you valuable opportunities to get your site listed in the crawler-based engines, expose your site to your audience and increase the absolute value of your pages (also known as Google Page Rank). The first (and, if you succeed, maybe the only) directories to get listed in are the Yahoo and DMOZ.
There are other directories such as JoeAnt which can be quite useful also, however, many of them are just not worth the trouble. There’s a worthy technique to determine if the directory can help you on your way to top rankings and traffic. When you are considering placement in a directory, check it’s “robots.txt” file (which we’ve covered in the previous section about optimizing the site structure) and look if it allows the major search engines to crawl it. If they don’t allow crawlers to go through their directory, it will is useless for you to get listed.
As you remember, the robots.txt file is always in the root directory so just type the full URL of the site and add “/robots.txt” on the end to see the file.
When submitting to the directories, remember that they are search engines powered by humans. All listings within the directories are compiled by human editors. You already know how important a listing in a directory can be; please find time to make some recommended preparations for directory submission. This includes writing a 25 word or less description of your entire web site, which includes the use of the primary keyphrase you’ve optimized your home page for. Look that the description you write doesn’t misuse marketing language or hype.
Submitting To Yahoo
Being listed in theYahoo! Directory can potentially help you get included and rank better in crawler-based results, including not only Yahoo’s but also Google’s and MSN ’s.
The Yahoo! Directory allows you to submit in two ways: “Standard” which is free, and “Yahoo Directory Submit”, which involves a submission fee and annual fee of $299 ($600 if your site is adult-related) but guarantees your site will be reviewed by an editor within 7 days. However, it does not guarantee your inclusion and the fee is non-refundable.
To choose from the submission options, go to http://dir.yahoo.com/, choose the appropriate category and then click the “suggest a site” link in the top right section.
Anyone can use Standard submission to submit for free to a non-commercial category. You’ll know the category is non-commercial because if you try to submit to a non-commercial category, the Standard submission option will be offered in addition to the Yahoo Express paid option, discussed further below.
If you choose the free submit, there’s no guarantee that your submission will be reviewed quickly or reviewed at all.
You can have a commerce site and still try to submit for free to a non-commercial category, however you will use caution when submitting. Let’s say you sell weather forecast software. If you submit your site as such, chances are good it will not be accepted; but, if you highlight a page that tells interesting facts about weather and weather forecasting, this information can be considered a good reason to list your site in a non-commercial category.
If accepted into a commercial category for money, you’ll be reevaluated after a year and charged the submission fee again, if you want to stay in Yahoo’s commercial area. You should review the traffic you received from Yahoo over the past year to decide if it is worth paying the fee again. If not, you can decline to be listed again and you will not be charged. Most often, you will decide to drop your listing after a year, for the category itself does not bring much traffic. Remember that the directory listing is initially important for us as a doorway to a Google listing. Once we’ve done that, we may safely let the directory listing drop, most often without a significant impact on the search traffic the site receives. The crawler-based engines will keep revisiting and listing your site on their regular basis.
Remember the more carefully you prepare, research keywords, debug pages, write valuable content and compile your description, the more chances there are to be included, no matter if you’re using the Yahoo! Directory Submit or the Free Submission service.
Submitting To DMOZ
DMOZ / ODP is a catalog of the World Wide Web compiled by volunteers. Nowadays GoogleBot still uses DMOZ as the starting page for its regular crawls, although the DMOZ results are no longer shown in Google’s SERP, as they were earlier.
Submission to DMOZ is free but on the other hand there’s no guaranteed turnaround time for acceptance.
To suggest your site to DMOZ, go to http://www.dmoz.org/ and locate the category you want to be listed in. Then use the “suggest URL” link that is visible on the top of the category page. Fill out the form, and the submission process is complete.
If you are accepted, you should see your site appear within about three to six weeks. If this doesn’t happen, don’t try to resubmit. Instead, try to get your site listed in several regional or thematic categories.
As with Yahoo, it’s highly recommended that you take the time to learn more about the Open Directory before submitting, in order to maximize the amount of traffic you may receive.
