If you’re a non-American business with a .com web address, and your regional Yahoo ranking is important to you, then my story might interest you.

Recently my copywriting website dropped out of Yahoo’s Australian rankings. For quite a while, it had been at number 1 for my primary keywords “advertising copywriter”, “copywriter”, and “website copywriter”. But then it suddenly disappeared. I clicked through about 10 pages of results, and it was nowhere to be seen. I then searched for my domain, and Yahoo couldn’t find it.

Something smelt fishy.

I’d done nothing ‘naughty’ to my site to warrant a ban, and I still had heaps of links to my site (actually, I had more than ever before).

I’m an Australian advertising copywriter. I’m based just north of Sydney and I host my website with a major Australian host. But my web address is a .com, not a .au. I started thinking this might be the problem.

So I emailed Yahoo support, explaining the problem, and sharing my thoughts on the cause.

And all of a sudden, nothing happened.

So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And finally, after about a couple of weeks, I received an email from a Yahoo support representative informing me – incorrectly – that my keyword wasn’t featured in my page title or description. I should remedy this shortcoming and re-submit my site to Yahoo.

Frustrated, I replied. I repeated the important facts from the first email just to ensure they’d listened. They hadn’t. They hadn’t even searched for my domain to confirm that Yahoo no longer recognised it.

When they got back to me this time, they had started paying a bit more attention. The support rep confirmed my suspicion that Yahoo had excluded my site because of its .com URL. Her very helpful solution was that I should change my domain to .au! She included some ridiculously complex instructions for how to do so, and sent me on my merry way.

As you might expect, I wasn’t satisfied. Nor was I merry. I explained to her that this was not an acceptable solution because all the links to my site on the internet are pointing to the .com and my email address uses the .com.

She was unmoved. She asserted that this was the best and only way to solve the problem. Oh… and it might help if I added my primary keyword to my title and description.

My laughter was not good humoured! I wrote back expressing my displeasure at this “solution”. I painstakingly explained how Yahoo had made a mistake, and that if Google was capable of recognising my Australian business despite its .com addresses, I would think it’s technically possible. I also cited several other .coms in the first couple of pages of Australian results.

No response.

The situation didn’t look promising…

If this sounds like a familiar story to you, don’t despair. A week or two later, I searched Yahoo Australia for my primary keyword, and surprise, surprise… My site was ranked number 1 again!

The moral to the story? Don’t be intimidated by Yahoo. Trust your instincts and don’t give up. If you’re an Australian business with a .com, and you’re not listed in Australian searches, this might be why. In fact, I would think this story is relevant to all regional Yahoos. (Of course, before making any accusations, it’s a good idea to make sure your site is properly optimised and that you have plenty of inbound links.)

Anyway, that’s my story. I hope it helps someone.

And they all lived happily ever after. So far at least…

Yahoooooooo!

The End.

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.DivineWrite.com or www.ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

At the beginning of the web era, users would go to directories to find sites relevant to their interests. In fact, Yahoo!, the web’s number one destination, started as a directory. Nowadays, most users rely on search engines, not directories, to find what they’re looking for.

When search engines started to become popular, they relied on web pages’ ‘keyword metatags’ to determine the topic and relevance of the page (the keyword metatag is a section within a web page’s HTML code where webmasters can insert words that are relevant to the page’s content). Webmasters discovered that by stuffing their meta tags with popular search terms repeated hundreds of times, they could propel their pages to the top of the search results.

Search engines caught up to the abuse and decided to ignore the meta tags and rely instead on web page copy. Webmasters then started to overstuff their page copy with popular search terms, often writing them in the same color as the web page’s background, so that they could be detected by search engines while being invisible to users.

Again, search engines discovered the trick and decided that the best way to rank a web page’s content and its topical relevance was to rely on inbound links from other pages. The rationale behind this is that it is much more difficult to influence other people to link to you than it is to manipulate your own web page elements. In fact, inbound links are the foundation of Google’s Pagerank™ algorithm.

There are several ways to get inbound links, among them writing articles that include your bylines with a link to your page, exchanging links, and listing your site in directories.

Listing your sites in good directories is probably the best way to get quality links that are highly valued by the search engines. Since directories rely on human editors who enforce strict criteria to list a site, and since directories organize the information in highly focused categories, they are an invaluable resource for search engines to measure the quality and the relevance of a web page.

In summary, directories are important not because they generate significant traffic (they don’t), but because they are given great importance by the search engines to qualify and rank web pages, and to determine their topical relevance.

You should definitely list your site with quality directories if you want to increase your chances of success with the search engines.

About The Author

Mario Sanchez: http://www.theinternetdigest.net. For more search engine tips go to: http://www.accordmarketing.com/seotips/

In October 2002, the Yahoo! portal changed the way it delivers search results. In the past, the most prominent results were exclusively culled from websites listed in the Yahoo directory itself. Since October, sites listed in the Yahoo directory no longer enjoy this privileged status.

The Google search engine now drives the primary search results on Yahoo. While this is certainly an improvement for users of Yahoo search, it’s a disaster for many businesses that counted on their Yahoo listing to deliver substantial traffic.

This change has also led many site owners to question the value of a listing in the Yahoo directory. In this article, I will outline the pros and cons of maintaining, or paying for, a Yahoo listing. In the process, I will delve into more details of the recent changes.

Argument #1: Yahoo Listings Mean Link Popularity

Pro: Even if the Yahoo listing itself delivers little or no traffic, other search engines will rank your website higher if it’s listed in Yahoo. Because Yahoo is so important, a link from Yahoo counts more than a regular link. Thanks to its higher "PageRank," Yahoo means even more to Google.

Con: Yahoo listings do not deliver nearly as significant a contribution in this area as you might think. You can verify this by doing a "backward links" search on Google for any Yahoo-listed website. The most important links are listed first, and the Yahoo listing is rarely even on the first page of links for top ranked sites on Google.

Argument #2: Listed Sites Look Better In The Search Results

Pro: Websites with a Yahoo listing show up in the combined Yahoo/Google results with their title, description, and category from the Yahoo directory. This may boost the response when the site appears in the search results. This applies when the URL listed in the results is the same as the URL in the Yahoo listing.

Con: Results listed with Yahoo information include a link to the site’s category, which may prompt surfers to pass over your listing and go to the category. Sites without Yahoo listings have the more inviting "search within this site" link, which leads to more results exclusively from your site.

So, Is A Yahoo Listing Worth It?

If you have a non-commercial site and can get listed for free, of course! If you’re not one of the lucky few, though, you have to evaluate whether it’s worth $299 a year for what amounts to a better than average incoming link. Everyone must make their own decision. If $299 is small compared to your total marketing budget, it may be easier to just continue paying. My own listing expires in March, and I don’t intend to renew it.

How Can You Profit From The Changes At Yahoo?

The obvious answer is that you must take steps to improve your own position in Google’s search results. Google’s rankings are made up of many factors, but the dominant factor is "PageRank," which is based on the number and quality of incoming links from other websites.

Therefore, the first step in improving your position on the Google search engine (and now Yahoo) is to improve your site’s link popularity. This takes time, and trying to take shortcuts can get you into real trouble - Google doesn’t like "link farms," or any program designed to artificially boost your link popularity.

Finding Quality Link Partners Through Google

Since only links from quality sites will count for much with Google, let’s take a quick look at how you can find these sites. Start by targeting the sites that link to existing top-ranked sites. You can do a backward links search for any site by typing "link:http://www.domain.com" in the Google search engine.

An even faster method is to use the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/), which requires Internet Explorer 5 or greater, running on Windows. With the toolbar’s advanced features enabled, you can conduct a "backward links" search from the "Page Info" menu for any site you visit.

Since Google lists these results in descending order by "PageRank," you can quickly determine the best places to get links by doing backward links searches on the top 10-20 sites for your desired search terms, and seeking links from the top 10-20 places that link to them.

Links Are Not Enough: Optimizing For Google

While "PageRank" is the dominant factor in Google’s algorithm, it’s not the only factor, and you still need to optimize your web pages. This can be a complicated topic, but the most important factors are:

Don’t Complain, Act!

By some estimates, Google now controls 2/3rds of the searches conducted on the Internet in a given day. Not only is Google.com extremely popular in its own right, but Google also controls the search results on popular portals like AOL and Iwon.com - not to mention Yahoo.

A lot of website owners are complaining bitterly about this change. All the more reason for you to take action now, while so many of your competitors are busy licking their wounds. With a little planning and effort, you could be in a dominant position on Google before they even get started.

I wish you success…

About The Author

Dan Thies is the author of "Search Engine Optimization Fast Start," the ultimate beginner’s guide to higher search engine rankings - available today at http://www.cannedbooks.com

Getting a ranking in search engine queries for highly competitive categories is becoming more and more difficult. The most important factor in getting a high ranking is to build a site that truly deserves to get a top ranking; a site that provides much useful information about the subject that is being searched for. However, in addition to providing relevant content, it is the presentation of the content that plays an important part in separating sites that reach the top of search engine queries and those that are buried on page 25. One factor in presentation and optimization that is often underestimated is the naming of files and directories.

Make a search for a keyword that is important to your site and look at the results that come up in the leading search engines. There is a very good chance that the keyword that you used in your search was contained somewhere in the url of the top sites. The keywords are sometimes contained in the domain name, or in other parts of the file name. One of my new clients has a site dealing with dieting. I made a search for dieting in Google, and found that 8 out of 10 of the top sites listed had the word dieting somewhere in the url, either in the domain name or in other parts of the file name.

So, the first thing to consider is whether it is possible to include your main keyword in your domain name. If you already have an established domain name and website, and the keyword is not included, then it is out of the question to change your domain name. However, in this case you can use some of the tips that follow in this article which will show you how to add your keywords to other parts of the url, and if you later set up any subsidiary domains related to your main domain, then try to work in your keyword or keywords into the new domain name.

Do the keywords have to be hyphenated in the domain names or file names? This has been a much contested issue, but if you look at how Google is presently handling queries you can make your own conclusions. If you make a query for a particular keyword in Google, and then pay a close look at the urls of the websites on the search results pages, you will see that the queried keyword appears in bold in the urls and they will be bold even when the keyword is combined with other words without hyphenation. So for Google at least you do not need to make a domain such as www.website-search-engine-optimization-promotion.com (as some people have done!).

Directories and File Names

While a lot of attention is usually paid to including the keyword in the domain names, less attention is paid to including the keyword in the inner files of the site. For example, when I did the query on the dieting, the top three sites did not have the word dieting in the domain name, but in the file names.

If you are in an extremely competitive category then you can experiment and make pages with your keyword in three different parts of the file name. If possible in the domain name, in the directory name and in the individual file name. Let’s take an example. Suppose your target keywords are “dvd players”. You might want to register a domain name such as www.dvdplayers.com and then build a file such as this one http://www.dvdplayers.com/dvdplayers/dvdplayers.html The keywords are repeated three times in the url alone (in the domain name, in the directory name and in the file name)! Suppose you were not able to get the domain www.dvdplayers.com, then don’t worry about it just make a file such as www.mydomain.com/dvdplayers/dvdplayers.html. By the way if you don’t know the mechanics of directory and file naming, ask your webmaster and she will know what to do.

Don’t miss the chance to include your keywords in file names. Instead of making a file name that says “about.html” it would be better to make it “aboutdvdplayers.html.” However, don’t overdo it. The file names should be short and easy to remember and also easy for you to find when you are editing the site, but there is no need to waste opportunities for optimization by naming your files: page1.html, page2.html and page3.html.

If you do not have relevant content then file naming alone won’t save you, however if you have a good site but are having trouble getting a top ranking, then make some experiments. Make a new directory named after your main keyword or keywords, and make a new file with this same keyword or keyword combination in the file name. Repeat these keywords in the title tag, description tag, in the body of the text and in the headers on that page and submit this new page to the search engines and see what happens.

Copyright 2004

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing search engine optimization, copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. He publishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at http://www.a1-optimization.com/newsletter.html

One of the most important steps in any site’s publicity campaign is the submission to the Open Web Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) as this directory provides search results for many of the most important search engines and online portals. This directory is not a robot driven spider, but a human edited directory and you must observe a few important points if your submission is to be successful.

http://resource-zone.com/ubbthreads.php .There you can ask about the status of your submission, but you must give them the date and category to which you submitted your site. You can ask questions about the procedures etc, but one more thing, don’t argue with the editors. Find out how the editors of the directory work and do your best to meet their conditions and you will be successful.

About The Author

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (www.a1-optimization.com) a firm providing affordable search engine optimization and other website promotion services. You can get his monthly newsletter “A1-Web Promotion Tips” by sending an email to subscribe@a1-optimization.com

support@a1-optimization.com

Directories are important to your ranking and success with Search Engines. In a nutshell, search engines are completely automated and usually there is no need to submit. Directories all have human editors who review your site and you do have to submit to them to be listed. But you must submit the right way or you are wasting your time.

If you think getting listed in search engines is slow, try directories. Getting listed in directories takes time but it is well worth it.

One of the good things about getting listed in directories is that Google puts a LOT of weight on sites that are listed in directories. DMOZ is the most important one to Google (and therefore should be the most important one to you).

Junk sites can get listed in the search engines, but try getting a junk site past one of the human directory editors. You can’t even get useful sites that are poorly designed past the "eagle eyed" directory editors. Maybe that’s why Google puts so much weight on sites that have achieved the status of being listed in directories.

There are a LOT of directories, but there are only a few that you should bother with now.

Here are the major directories

www.DMOZ.org — Free. Submit to DMOZ first. (DMOZ is also called "Open Directory Project" on their website). They take a LONG time to get your site listed, but do NOT resubmit or your site will go back to the bottom of the stack. To find out about the status of your site getting listed go to www.Resource-Zone.com and ask questions in the discussion forum directly to the DMOZ editors.

www.Gimpsy.com — Free or pay $20 for 72 hr. inclusion and higher ranking for 90 days.

www.JoeAnt.com — Pay $39.99 or become an editor and it’s free. All editor applications are automatically approved. I suggest you become an editor. You’ll learn a lot.

www.GoGuides.org — Pay $39.99 or become a "guide" (same as editor for other Directories) and it’s free.

www.Business.com — $99 a year, but well worth it if you sell your products to businesses. You’ll get a lot of interested and qualified traffic.

www.Yahoo.com — Yahoo is no longer worth the $299 a year fee in my opinion. Skip this one.

Here’s how to get listed in these major directories. Of course, you have to submit your URL to the directory to get listed, but before you do that consider the following steps: Don’t jump the gun and submit a site that is under construction.

Make sure your site is well designed, easy to use, has useful content, no spam, no tricks, no broken links, etc. A human editor is in charge of "widgets" and she wants all of the sites in her widgets section of the directory to be useful to the directory visitors.

By all means spend a LOT of time reading the instruction of each directory before you submit. Don’t rush to submit your site until you understand what the directory is looking for and how they want you to do it.

Your directory title and description are very important to getting your site listed in the directory. They are also important after you’re listed. Your title and description are what potential visitors to your site will see in the directory listings.

Here are some tips for writing your title and description for directories.

Do NOT use any marketing hype (Never use words like "best"). Stick to the facts. Be descriptive. Choose your most importnant keyword phrase, but don’t try to stuff a lot of keywords in your title and description. Tricks will kill your chances of getting listed. The human editor has to like you and your site before your site will get listed. So follow the rules!

The most important thing to do is to submit your site in the right category. Drill down to the most specific category you can. Look at your competitors. What category are they in? Look at the sites that are in the category you choose. Look at their titles and descriptions.

You want to follow these examples, but you don’t want to be exactly like these sites. Directories don’t want sites that contain basically identical information to what’s already in the directory.

As soon as your site is completed submit it to DMOZ and get the clock to start ticking. A listing in DMOZ will automatically get you listed in the Google search engine and in the Google directory.

Of course, you can get listed in the Google search engine much quicker by having incoming links from other sites, so don’t wait on DMOZ to get you listed in the Google Search Engine. Do depend on it to get you listed in the Google Directory.

A lot of people say they don’t want to spend the effort trying to get listed in the directories because it could take three months. (I’ve seen it get done in one month, but sometimes it has taken six months.) I know people who said this over a year ago. They could have had a much higher PageRank and a LOT more free traffic by now if they had spent a few hours back then submitting their sites to the directories.

Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen and some people wonder what happened. You have to make things happen if you want to get high rankings in the search engines.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership software

I was all set to write an article predicting the future of search engines, when Yahoo dropped Google and replaced it with its own engine. Now that’s big news. In less than twenty-four hours, Google went from about 79% of the market share to about 51%, almost overnight. And what a welcome relief it is too! Being #1 in Google was great, but when you had the misfortune of dropping even a couple of positions you really felt it. Now there will be more stability; if you drop in Google today, your hits from Yahoo will remain consistent.

What is the new Yahoo?

Last year, Yahoo bought the AltaVista, Fast, and Inktomi search engines. The new Yahoo results are none of these. Many people are saying that the results come from a new Inktomi because the results are similar; but the results are also similar to all the other search engines out there. In comparing these engines, it seems to me that Yahoo’s results are from a brand new engine. Maybe they took parts and ideas from all the search engines they bought - maybe they even took the best parts - , but whatever they did, the result is something completely new.

Which search engine is better?

I will be comparing Google and Yahoo for the terms "music", "art prints and posters", "Bahamas real estate", "mosquito nets", and "liposuction". The other search engines all hold less than 4% of the market share (except for MSN which uses Yahoo’s Inktomi), so I won’t be considering them. Here is what I found in the top 10 results for each keyphrase:

Music

Yahoo offers a lot of music resource sites. Information about music from different sources such as magazine, TV and other music news sites are found 6 times in the top 10 results. It also offered downloading and file sharing programs 3 times. The 10th result was an audio player program site.

Google has a lot more diversity. There were 3 music resource sites (but no magazines), one downloading program, one CD store, one radio station (Yahoo radio), one music directory, and the 10th result was an audio player program site. Google also had 2 sites in its top ten that were of no value whatsoever; MP3.com which just has one page stating that they no longer offer the services that they used to (with links to their parent company), and music.com, which is nothing more than an email gathering site for a newsletter (not a single link on the entire page).

Google’s diversity is a big bonus, but the 2 spam/junk/useless sites really hurt it. The results? Yahoo 1, Google 0.

Art Prints And Posters

Yahoo offers 6 stores, while Google offers 5. The other links are all affiliate spam with no content whatsoever (just links to stores), with the exception of one of Yahoo’s links, which has some biographical content about artists. So Google has 5 spam sites, and Yahoo has 3 and a half.

Yet another round goes to Yahoo.

Bahamas Real Estate

For this keyphrase, I found results between Google and Yahoo to be quite similar. The only differences were sites by actual realtors and sites that were simply property listings. Both types of results are useful, with Google having an edge in realtors. Google had some lower quality sites, but the information was just as good even though they did seem less professional. On the other hand, Yahoo did have one site that was nothing more than a links page from another realtor’s site. Big boo boo.

This one goes to Google.

Mosquito Nets

It seems to me that someone searching for "mosquito nets" wants either A) to buy them, or B) to learn about them, so I was expecting to find either stores or information about mosquito nets. Yahoo showed me 6 stores and 2 informational pages. The other results were a search result page (not a good result) and an inner page from a previous result (also not a good result).

Google gave me 7 stores and 3 charitable organizations (one of which was a store as well). The other 2 charitable organizations were a news article outlining what they had done regarding mosquito nets and information about mosquito nets.

So even though I didn’t necessarily want the latest news about what a charity did regarding mosquito nets, I think getting the same site twice from Yahoo (not to mention the search result page) is the bigger no-no. Google wins this round.

Liposuction

I expected to find information about liposuction, liposuction organizations and either doctors or centers where you can have liposuction done. What I got was a lot of "how to find a doctor" sites, with a lot of good information.

Yahoo results included 3 sites doubled. This is a problem that killed AltaVista in the late 90’s. Hopefully they will have it fixed soon. Other than the 3 doubled sites, the results included 4 informational sites, 2 sites for finding doctors and one poorly written article about the history of liposuction.

Google gave me 4 good informational sites, 2 good "find a doctor" sites, one recent article about liposuction for people in the industry, one site with very poor information one written by a single doctor and one site that was nothing more than a directory.

Google gets this round as well. Overall, it looks like Yahoo needs to fix its doubling of sites and Google needs to clean out some spam (poor sites).

And The Winner Is…

You! Having two good search engines to choose from makes searching that much better for everyone. It also makes getting listings better. It also makes marketing better. It also makes traffic to your site steadier. The only way this could have been worse is if Yahoo’s results sucked, and they don’t. They seem just as good, if not better, than Google’s.

So rejoice, and enjoy a more dynamic world of online searching!

About The Author

Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. (http://www.redcarpetweb.com/). He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field.

Contact: shawn@redcarpetweb.com

As an authorative hub a link from a DMOZ directory category to your website will give your site a boost in PageRank™ and may assist in getting search engine spiders to crawl your site faster and more often. Google also uses DMOZ data for its Google directory.

What does this mean? It is well known in seo circles that by having a site listing in DMOZ you will also get a listing in the Google directory, effectively creating two high PageRank™ backlinks. Hundreds if not thousands of smaller sites also use Dmoz directory data. Check my search engine relationship table for who DMOZ supplies directory data to. So from a single listing in DMOZ the potential for hundreds of backlinks can stack up quite substantially.

Unlike Yahoo! with it’s paid inclusion via Yahoo! Express, you may submit your site freely to DMOZ for inclusion into their database. This can be a harrowing and traumatic experience for some as the DMOZ directory submission requirements are very tight and strict.

DMOZ prides itself on listing websites with high quality content, culling bad and garbage sites. Hopefully I can lay to rest some of your DMOZ submission fears.

Prior website checks before submitting to DMOZ
A peek at the site suggest guidelines at DMOZ gives a few clues as to what DMOZ editors look for when processing site submissions.

I don’t know how many times I have read on forums and message boards webmasters complaining they have submitted their site/s to DMOZ over and over again only to be rejected.

You can bet their site either doesn’t conform to the submission guidelines, was submitted to the wrong category or was just complete crap with no quality content.

Here is the DMOZ submission guidelines list taken from their site. Follow it to the ‘T’ and ensure your site conforms.

• Do not submit mirror sites. Mirror sites are sites that contain identical content, but have altogether different URLs.
• Do not submit URLs that contain only the same or similar content as other sites you may have listed in the directory.
• Sites with overlapping and repetitive content are not helpful to users of the directory.
• Multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.
• Do not disguise your submission and submit the same URL more than once.
• Do not submit any site with an address that redirects to another address.
• The Open Directory has a policy against the inclusion of sites with illegal content. Examples of illegal material include child pornography; libel; material that infringes any intellectual property right; and material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence).
• Do not submit sites under construction. Wait until a site is complete before submitting it. Sites that are incomplete, contain Under Construction notices, or contain broken graphics or links aren’t good candidates for the directory.
• Submit pornographic sites to the appropriate category under Adult.
• Submit non-English sites to the appropriate category under World.
• Don’t submit sites consisting largely of affiliate links.

A good tool for checking inbound and outbound links is Xenu Link Sleuth, it does a great job and of course it’s free. The reason I have focused on site link checking is the DMOZ editor will most likely run a similar program on your site when reviewing it.

Submission Time
Ok your site is set, you conform to the DMOZ submission guidelines, Let’s do this thing! Surf to DMOZ and perform a search using a broad search term that relates to your site. You will be presented with a category full of sites that should relate to your site theme. At the top of the page should be sub-category links.

At this point ask yourself two questions;

1. Does my site fit this category?

2. Is there a Suggest URL link on the page for this category?

The idea behind this is to find the closest category match to your website. If you answer no to any of the previous two questions drill down further using the sub-category links at the top of the page until a suitable category match is found.

NOTE* Something to note when finding a category is region. If your website is regional submit using regional categories first before drilling down.
If you think you have found the right category visit some of the sites that are listed to be sure they are similar to yours.

Suggest URL
Congratulations! You have found your niche category that best fits your site. Click the Suggest URL link and let the fun begin.

Titling Your Site
This is an area where most webmasters come unstuck by using promotional words in their titles. DMOZ editors don’t take kindly to it. Use your real site title. If your official website title is Tech Law, then that is the title to submit.
As stated in the DMOZ submission guidelines, don’t use all capitals in your title.

Site Description
When describing your site common sense should prevail. As with writing page descriptions for meta description tags, write a compelling, brief, and descriptive overview of your site. Don’t be overly promotional and keep the site description free flowing.

Always describe your site from a third person view. If DMOZ editors write a description for your site they will use third person view.The idea is for your site to be listed with your description. So make the DMOZ editors task as simple as possible. If you write from a third person view and give an accurate description the editor may not make any changes to it. Using correct grammar and spelling is a must.

One way to get help for an accurate description is to ask friends to view your website or ask people from forums to view your site. Use their feedback to write a compelling, accurate and non-promotional description.

The long wait
DMOZ is free submission and edited by volunteers. There is no paid express directory inclusion and from what is stated at the DMOZ directory website, nor shall there ever be.

Processing of site submissions will take a while, even up to six months, sometimes longer. Don’t focus on this but instead continue to build quality content for your site. As one of my mentors recently stated in his ebook.
“I usually submit and forget about it.”

(c)2005 Paul Cody

Paul Cody has for the last six years studied website design and search engine optimization. Paul is active in a number of webmaster forums and has recently launched his new site http://www.auswebdesigns.net focusing on seo resources for webmasters new to this area of site design.

Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:
- Listings within major directories provide "context" to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, "blue cats").
- Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.
- Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.
- The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape - once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

- Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

- Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

- Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing directory and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

- You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it’s worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it’s at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

Otilia Otlacan is a young certified professional with expertise in e-Marketing and e-Business, currently working as independent consultant and e-publisher. She developed and teach her own online course in Principles of e-Marketing and recently launched a Marketing Links Directory - MarketingWHO. Her current SEO client is Colorado Homes | Denver Real Estate. Contact Otilia through TeaWithEdge.com, her Marketing and e-Marketing articles and resources portal.

Getting listed in Yahoo! (The Very Top Search Engine/Index) is a lot like getting a date with the most beautiful girl in high school - often all you have to do is ask PROPERLY. I can make that statement because I have NEVER submitted a site to Yahoo! that wasn’t listed. I’ve read a lot about how difficult it is getting listed, and how frustrating it is - so maybe I am just very lucky. Then again, if you follow the same steps that have ALWAYS worked for me, there is no reason to believe that they won’t work for you too. So I wanted to share with you in four short steps how to get listed.

The first step is ensuring your site is READY. The staff at Yahoo! is very busy. A person has to physically look over your site and decide if it’s appropriate for the category submitted and if it’s worth listing. They get thousands of submissions to review. So begin by putting yourself in the reviewer’s shoes; if you would be unimpressed by reviewing your site, then the reviewer probably will be too. If that’s the case, fix the problems with your site before submitting it. The reviewers are humans - with all the quirks that humans are subject to, and you must account for that.

Site readiness means two major thing to me: (1) It contains sufficient content worth listing and (2) It is complete enough that it contains absolutely no dead links, and it can be easily navigated. Every site should be under constant update - so that’s not a real problem - just leave off leave the unnecessary "under construction" gifs.

Most people who visit the internet are looking for free information on some topic - furnish this information and your site fills a need and is therefore worth listing. My main site is a perfect example of this. It contains articles on internet marketing by a variety of diverse, experienced authors. A surfer gets a lot of very useful CONTENT from visiting and therefore my site is "worth" listing. I am constantly adding to this storehouse, so it is never really complete, but it was ready for listing when first submitted. Every link led to some real resource, and not a disappointing "file not found."

After you know that your site is ready, step two is simply submitting it properly. Using the Yahoo! search box, find sites similar to yours. Click on the "suggest a site" icon and suggest your site in the same category. Fill in all of the fields completely and accurately. You’re not going to fool the reviewer and if you submit to the wrong category you annoy a very busy reviewer - and guarantee that you won’t be listed.

Step three is probably the hardest - you wait. While some search engines list your site within days, Yahoo! may take months. So after you know that you have properly submitted your content rich, submission ready site in the proper categories, you display a little patience.

But not too much patience; step 4 is resubmitting. If your site isn’t listed in about 6 weeks, resubmit. Keep resubmitting until it is listed! That’s partly how I can honestly say that I have never submitted a site that wasn’t listed - I am very, very persistent. In marketing, whether on or offline, persistence is the key. Sort of like asking that pretty girl out again - eventually she would probably say "why not." While my main site at http://www.williecrawford.com was listed the very first time it was submitted, and shows up under "INTERNET MARKETING 101" (with quotation marks) as the first listing, I have client sites listed in Yahoo that I did have to submit several times - but they all got listed.

It all boils down to realizing that of all the search engines and indexes, Yahoo! generates the most hits. So it’s definitely worth the effort! You will not get listed if you don’t submit your site, and you probably won’t get listed if you don’t submit properly. Do it right the first time and profit from this most cherished of listings.

About The Author

Willie Crawford is a marketing consultant, promotion specialist and popular writer. His website contains over 180 articles on internet marketing as well as a very active discussion forum. Visit today and begin learning what really DOES work in building your business http://www.williecrawford.com