Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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guidelines to follow, instead of a free-form e-mail correspondence). If you happen to

have a nonprofit or noncommercial website, you have greatly increased potential for

free links on directories.

Your directory requests will be accepted or rejected based on the judgment of

human editors, and part of what they judge is whether your suggested title and descrip-

tion match your site’s content. So if you have substantial optimization that needs to

take place before this is the case, use today’s task just to gather submittal information.

You can perform the actual submittal when your site is ready.

We’ve boiled down the wide world of directories into three areas for you to

review:

• The Open Directory Project

• Yahoo! Directory

• Paid or niche directories

The Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project (ODP), at

www.dmoz.org

, goes by many names, including

Open Directory, DMOZ, and Netscape Directory. Unfortunately, getting your site listed

in the ODP can take, quite literally, forever, and its importance as a linking site has

diminished greatly over time.

However, your ODP description is still used by the Google search engine as the

description that displays in some search results (rather than a snippet or meta descrip-

tion). For this reason alone, we think that your ODP submittal is worth the time. And

for sure, it’s worth the price (thankfully, this submittal is free).

First, determine whether your site has a current listing in the ODP. Go to

www.dmoz.org

and search for your URL. (But watch out; sometimes the ODP misses

URLs. If a URL search shows no results, follow up with a search for your company

name.) If you find a listing for your company, assess its quality with these questions:

• Is the link functional and current?

• Is the title and description accurate?

• Do the title and description contain my target keywords?

ODP listings are so rarely updated that it’s likely your listing needs some fixing.

Click the “update listing” link near the top of the page and submit your edits (see Fig-

ure 7.1). The ODP provides extensive guidelines within the update submittal screens.

We won’t bore you by repeating the guidelines, so promise us you’ll read and follow

them as you go!

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