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Website listing
Having your site listed on
Yahoo! and the
Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is one of the best ways to
gain high quality backlinks. Being listed on these top
directories also influences your placement in other search
engines and directories.
Yahoo! charges $299 annually for a listing in their
directory. They do however guarantee that your site will be
reviewed within 7 business days.
The
Open Directory Project (DMOZ) can also take months and
repeated submissions before you’re indexed. If your site has
been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere
from two weeks to several months for your site to be listed
on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as
AOL Search,
Google,
Netscape Search,
Yahoo Search, and
hundreds of other sites. Open Directory is definitely
worth your effort.
On rare occasions,
these directories will allow you to slip some keywords into
the title, but do so at your own risk. This practice could
raise a red flag for your submission and subject it to
additional scrutiny.
The website
description you include with your submission has a big
impact upon how your site will rank once it’s listed in the
directory. It is very important to get it right the first
time. If you include too much promotional jargon in your
description or make it too long, the human editors are sure
to change it. If they do, it’s highly unlikely that your
keywords won’t appear in the final listing. Be concise, be
sensible, and, most of all, include your most important
keywords wherever you can without appearing to be keyword
loading.
Start with your meta
description tag for your site. Copy and paste it into the
submission form, then start deleting extraneous words.
Reposition words until you have the shortest yet most
descriptive sentence possible. If you do this correctly,
chances are the editors won’t alter it. They’ll appreciate
the fact that you saved them the time of editing the
description.
The words you’re using
in your description must appear on the pages of your site.
If they don’t, and the site appears to be about subjects
other than what you described in your form, your description
might be edited. It’s almost impossible to change a site
description once it’s listed in most Internet directories.
Get it absolutely right the first time.
One shortcut to getting into DMOZ
is to volunteer as an editor in the category you wish to
appear. The time investment in most cases is well worth the
return of having exactly the listing you want approved with
just one submission.
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