Enterprise Mastermind

Haven’t read Part 1 or 2 yet?
SEO Basics – Part 1 , SEO Basics – Part 2

The Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

I have included the ODP in this guide for one simple reason. To tell you not to bother. In theory the ODP is a bunch of kind hearted individuals that give their own time to review your submitted sites and decide whether they met the criteria for the chosen category. In practice the editors of the categories are all mini-dictators who all take great pleasure in keeping their little bit of the internet how they want it and dashing peoples hopes of inclusion all for a boost of their own egos. Perhaps I’m wrong, but thats my experience.

If you do submit to the ODP then don’t hold your breath, they will either:

1. Throw your submission out with the rest of toys from their prams.
   
2. Never receive your submission because there are no editors for that category any more.
   
3. Put it in a queue and forget about it for a year or two

In my opinion (keep the comments clean please) I think the ODP is a relic from when the internet was a much smaller place and is now just an irrelevance.

Free and paid for directories

Submission to directories is an important part of website promotion for the simple fact that it will increase incoming links. As stated previously (see Links in SEO Basics Part 2) links from sources that contain lots of other relevant links are some of the most valuable to a search engine.

A quick trawl of the web will reveal a massive amount of directories that will list your site for a fee and listing to multiple directories can become an expensive business. Look for free directories with a good PageRank (PR) on their listings pages, (you can see the PR of a page if you install the Google Toolbar – www.toolbar.google.com). Try listing with as many of these free directories as possible before moving on to the paid for inclusions.

Large directories such as yell.com are worth joining if you have the budget but need to be set up carefully if you want your target market to find you. Don’t think that because these services have a massive marketing budget (TV, radio, web, print) that your work is done and that leads will come flooding in. Keywords have to be chosen carefully and your description worded correctly to enable searches for your products and services to highlight your listing and not your competitors.

Submit your site

There are some excellent tools out there for submitting your site to the search engines such as IBP/Arelis, particularly useful if you want to submit your site to all of the smaller search engines as well as the big players. Online web services such as Submit Express will submit to the top 20+ search engines for free but mind that you tick the boxes so that ’special offers’ don’t start filling your inbox.

All said and done, arguably its only the big players such as Yahoo and Google that really count and once indexed by these, most others will follow anyway. Use the URLs below to submit your site but don’t expect immediate results, depending on what type of site its is/how long the domain name has been registered it can take weeks to months for a site to get indexed.

Submit to Yahoo (UK): http://uk.search.yahoo.com/info/submit
Submit to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/