How To Properly Submit Your Website To Directories

How To Properly Submit Your Website To Directories
© 2004 Jeff D. Schuman
http://www.team-schuman.com

Having a top placement on a search engine and enjoying the
traffic that comes with a top ranking is dependent on many
things. Certainly at the top of that list is having as many
links and quality links pointing to your site. Your
competition has hundreds and possibly even thousands of
links pointing back to them. This is what it is going to
take for you to compete with them as well.

Did you know that over 90% of search engine traffic comes
from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These three search engines
provide results for many other search engines, and if you
are listed on these three search engines, your site will be
listed on many other search engines too.

AltaVista for example gets their search results from Yahoo.
AOL and Netscape use Google and also get some results from
Open Directories like DMOZ.

When you see an ad offering to submit your site to
thousands of search engines save your money. It simply is
not worth the time it takes to sign up for their service
and you are better off to spend your money on another form
of promoting.

What is worth the time and money is to submit your site to
as many different directories as possible. Directories are
viewed by human beings before being approved for submission and
their inclusion helps increase your link popularity as you have
more and more links pointing back to your site.

Since your submission is viewed by human beings it is
important that you make sure your site is ready to be
submitted. To get your site in shape to be submitted
consider the following:

1. Make sure your site is completed. Fix all broken links.
Have all pages completed. Make sure it loads properly and
quickly. If you want get another opionion on whether it is
ready to be submitted. Here is a good company that
validates websites: http://www.htmlvalidator.com/

2. Find the correct category to be listed under. Although
this can be frustrating it is important to take the time to
find the correct category and sub-category for your site to
be listed under. Choosing the wrong category could result
in your site being denied.

3. Submit the correct URL. This needs to be your main
domain and not sub-domains. In my case that would be
http://www.sites-plus.com and nothing else. Do not add the
index.html at the end when submitting.

4. Write an acceptable description of your site. You need
to keep it to 2 sentences and nothing more. If you have any
doubts about how to write a good description go to your
category and look at the descriptions of sites already
listed.

5. Use the official title of your site. This needs to be
the REAL Title of your site and not just the part that
shows in your browser. In my case that is Small Business
Resources.

Generally it is accepted that 2 key directories to submit
to are Yahoo and The Open Directory Project (ODP)

http://dir.yahoo.com/

http://dmoz.org/add.html

With Yahoo you will have to determine if you want a standard
submission which is free or an express submission which
costs $299.00. Submitting to the ODP is free.

Here is another site I came across that offers rankings on
the best directories to submit to
http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

For a more in depth look at submitting to directories read
this article here:
http://www.strongestlinks.com/articles/dirSubmitGuide.php

In conclusion submitting your site to directories is an important
part of the overall philosophy of getting quality links pointing
back to your site. The more the merrier. If you want to see what
it will take to get a Top 10 ranking for keywords relating to your
site just look at the number of links your competitors have pointing
to their sites.

You can easily do that by going here:
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo

Enter your the URL for your competitor and the click on the
Links Button. You can see how many links they have pointing
back to them according to Yahoo, Google, and GigiBlast. You
will see you need a lot of links pointing to your site to
compete with them. Adding your site to as many directories
as possible is one way to do that.