This is a good day for EggRage, and for a good reason – on July 13th of this year I posted an article about how to get into DMoz, to date it has been one of the most successful posts on this blog and has received more comments than any other article which I’ve written here.

Today, September 1st, 2008 – I logged into the Digital Designer Forum mentioned previously in my post about how to SEO a forum, to find that in a thread about submitting your site to DMoz, a new user named Eric-the-Bun had posted a rather lengthy reply to a thread linking to my original article about submitting your site to DMoz. His comments, weaved into my original post were as follows: (identified by block quotes)

How To: Submit Your Site To DMoz

Submitting a site to DMoz has long been known as one of the ”things to do” when it comes to SEO. Putting it into practice however, is something that’s often more easily said than done. People who get their sites accepted have long praised the DMoz editors, while those who have been denied entry through the pearly gates curse the editors as if they’ve done the earth some sinful injustice.

The Opening Directory project (DMoz) is very secretive in it’s nature and as such some really ‘good’ sites are often refused and no one understands why (which often leads to anger/fury/suicidal tendencies).

Usually they are waiting to be reviewed (unless of course they are not really good or are sites that won’t be accepted.

Ok let’s look at the facts. About 5000 active editors and nearly 500,000 categories – however many editors only have privileges to edit in a few categories. A rule of thumb is that there are probably about 500 editors who can edit in all categories or widely enough to count(eg UK-wide). So 1 editor has a nominal 1000 categories – how quickly do you think they will get through them? Well it depends on the area and how many suggestions they get. UK/County/little_village probably gets zero a year whilst each shopping sub-category will get hundreds.

It can take from ten minutes to 2 weeks to review a site and editors are volunteers. This means when I come home from work, I see if I have the time and inclination to spare to do some editing. Generally I manage something most days most weeks – I think my average this year is adding 20 sites a week – I also spend as much time on maintenance (correcting errors, removing dead-links, moving misplaced sites, etc) and learning about things that I need to know to edit properly.

There is no short cut to get listed because either an editor is limited to a few categories and will list your site within a few months (yes there are people who join just to list their sites and don’t do much else) or they are trusted enough to gain wider permissions and are rather fanatical about preserving their trusted status.

Well today hopefully I’ll be able to enlighten you a little as to how the whole process works, and how you can improve your chances of being accepted!

Lets begin at the beginning (vaguely); DMoz is in place to group together excellent and highly relevant websites into very specific categories. It got so popular because Google started taking data directly from DMoz and using it it’s SERPS. Google did this because of the very high quality that DMoz became known for.

DMoz is moderated by thousands of editors, who each have a category which they govern, as each category has a different editor you may find that some categories are much stricter than others, and as such: harder to get into!

In general, the guidelines prevent this. Some categories are maintained better than others and are thus quicker to get into (geologically speaking). Different categories have different guidelines for acceptance and in some cases the expected category does not exist. A case in point is real estate where due to the huge amount of spam, extremely strict rules are applied.

Let’s Get Started

So, the first thing to do is search DMoz for your site,

Good advice – leave the http://www. off the site name else the search won’t find it. Note the search works on the RDF dump which is issued once a week (ish) so can be out of date.

it’s quite possible that if you have a great site then one of the editors may have already picked it up. Failing that, you need to find the best category to submit your site to, the best way to do this is to search DMoz for your most relevant keyword, IE your primary group of products and services. Typically, this will land you straight where you need to be, but it could also present you with a top level category, with a list of more specific categories linked at the top of the page.

Selecting Your Category

The higher up the directory you go, the more traffic the pages get and the higher page rank; but lower down (and more specific) categories have fewer sites, and as such less competition for the user click-through rates. In addition, the more specific the category you choose, (generally) the higher your chances of being accepted. DMoz has been around for a long time, and the top level categories have been stuffed pretty full (which is part of the reason the more specific categories were created), as a result, it’s unlikely that any site will get into one of the top level categories unless it’s something really special.

To get the highest rate of success, submit to the most specific category that your site fits into – and bare in mind that local listings are often a lot more friendly to than commercial ones! One of the best things that you can do is submit to a local category first, and after being accepted try your luck at a generic category.

Good advice here and I’ll add some more.

Sort out the 1,2 or 3 places you are eligible for and suggest them in one go.

If you have an actual premises where people can expect to contact you (I think it is now the law for UK sites to list it) pick the correct locality in Regional and the best category e.g.
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/Worthing/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/

Then determine what your site is about – the topic – as you can also suggest your site to a category under its topic if the site has a wider audience than local (i.e. a site for a pub, a lplumber, a tailor, is likely only to be listed in regional).

Lets take web design as an example (for no apparant reason). You can check the categories in http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_ … velopment/ for web design companies and see where you may fit. Let us say you are a company that is basically a vehicle for a free-lancer who is also employed elsewhere. It might go in to
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Freelance/L/

Now if the site is UK based, another place to look is http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Uni … velopment/ and
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/L/ might be an appropriate place.

Of course an editor placing the sites would be making his best guess at the appropriate place (they can’t be knowledgeable on all things) which is why the update url link is there.

For most sites the rule is to suggest once to location (if any) and once to topic (if eligible). UK sites are special as you can also suggest to a topical category under http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom if the site is eligible.

So you can suggest to 2 or 3 categories as described above if the site is eligible.

The Submission Screen

This is the place that will essentially make or break your site, so be very very cautious here! Here are the fields for you to consider (assuming that you mange to get your url right):

Title, Description, and Email Address – sounds simple doesn’t it? Let’s tackle them one by one.

Title
Let’s not get fancy, if your company’s name is BlueShirt and sells all sorts of designer clothes and accessories. Then your title should be ‘BlueShirt’ – the furthest that you could stretch would be ‘BlueShirt Clothing’ but absolutely not any further than that. Keep it simple and spam free.

If suggesting to Business, the title must be the company name no matter how irrelevant. Bear in mind if the category is (say) Web Designers, the type of sites within that category is already defined.
If suggesting elsewhere, the editors look for a meaningful combination of title and description. Using the website title is OK – the editor might not agree and may change it, but at least you have indicated your preference.

Description
Again, keep it simple, but this time you have a little more room to work with. The best thing which you can do here is study the other listings in the category which you are submitting to, and try to work to those guidelines as that is clearly what the editor is looking for. A good basic template to work from is

“BlueShirt Clothing – Offers a range of designer clothing products inluding, shirts, skirts, and sunglasses. Online store and free delivery on all orders, based in Brighton, East Sussex.”

Let’s break that down a bit further, ‘offers’ is pretty much a DMoz standard, it appears right beside your title so gramatically it makes sense. I’ve then listed the primary product type, and three of the primary products. In the next sentence I’ve described the site in two words, and offered a hook (or added bonus), and finally, I’ve said where the business is based, another DMoz frequent.

More or less spot on.

Descriptions will vary depending on the category. Editors read the title and description hoping it will tell them enough about the site before they enter it, so that we are confident it is in the right place and worth listing. Very few titles and descriptions survive intact.

First sentence should be who/what the site is about, second sentence what is on the site.

Remember it is not an advert, aim for dull.

Email Address
Doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO company or a family friend, always enter yourname@yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the url of the site being submitted.

Please make sure it is valid and, if using someone elses, let them know you suggested the site. If you are an SEO firm one of the worst things you can do is suggest a site with such an addresss. One SEO firm shotgun blasted an area of categories I looked after in such a way every couple of weeks. After getting a ‘?’ from the supposed suggestors, I worked out what was happening and emailed every site saying that if they had paid firm x for SEO ask for ther money back.

There are all sorts of myths about us liking/not liking suggestions from this or that type of firm/person. I personally look out for sites suggested by a number of seo and website firms because they make good suggestions. Others I look out for because they don’t. The only way I treat them differently is that for the first, I might ‘do another on before bed’ and for the second not.

Assuming you can manage the image verification that comes next, that’s it!

Final Things To Consider

This is where a lot of people trip up, so you’ve found a category, and submitted your site – what about whether or not your site is worthy to be included?

Check out http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/ – most of it is there.

The other place to look (albeit a bit painful) are the category descriptions. Start at the top of the section you think you belong to (eg Business) and the description will identify the sorts of sites that belong there and any vagaries the area might have. You can work downwards to see if there are any refinements but usually after a few levels down, you might find it more productive working upwards.

Well, DMoz is quite secretive (isn’t everyone these days?) about exactly what it looks for, but I can tell you a few things from experience. First and foremost, do you have an address and telephone number that is easy to find, you need both those to be accepted (fact). Other than that, there are a couple of other things that may help you, but they aren’t written in stone. First of all, how usable is your site? Is the navigation simple and easy to get around, and is the content concise and well written? Finally, do you think your site deserves to be included in the category which you have selected (before you say yes..) does it stand out from the other sites which are listed? Is it any better than the other listed sites? Is there a reason that users would buy something from you rather than one of the other sites?

Bare in mind that if you DO get accepted, Google may well replace your indexed Title and Description for your homepage with the content of your DMoz Title and Description, if you want to stop this from happening to use your own homepage title and description, simply add the following meta tag to the head of your index file.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

If you can come up with the answers to all the above questions and have done the submission process well, then you’ve got a good chance of being included. So all that remains for me to do is say good luck!

And don’t get downhearted if you don’t get in the first time, sadly editors will rarely email and tell you why, so keep trying every couple of months, amending your site and submission details as necessary.

And you were doing so well up til now
Please don’t. Your suggestion is there waiting for some editor to come along and review it (unless you suggested before the Great Crash of October 2006 when all the suggestions were lost, in which case suggest again). I’ve reviewed suggestions that were 5 years old and with the most appalling rubbish in the titles and description.

As an editor my role is to develop useful categories. To do that I need to look for suitable sites to add and can look anywhere I like – newspapers, vans, shop fronts, search engines, under the bridle of a yak in Nepal, etc. One of the places I can look is in the suggestion pool for the category. When an editor goes to develop a category, then, in most cases, all suggestons are gratefully received. Often a category will lie neglected for a long (geological) time and then have a burst of activity with all outstanding suggestions cleared.

In some categories the suggestion pool is a cesspit of spam, dread and loathing that few but the most hardy would venture into – well not quite. However in some places the ratio of good sites to poor Made for advertising sites is not very high and it is easier to find sites for yourself than relying on fishing in the pool.

This year I have listed ?600 sites of which less than 100 were suggested.

regards

PS in case your feel that DMOZ editors don’t appreciate what not getting listed means, I’d like to point out that I suggested my site to Yahoo back in 2005 and am still not listed, despite being no 1 for my keywords in most search engines, etc

And that concludes what I’ve found to be one of the most useful posts that I’ve ever come across on a forum, it may sound silly to some people but I’m honoured that Eric took all the time and effort to respond to my article in such detail and would like to thank him once again most sincerely for doing so.

For those of you who read the last article, now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! So go out there, behave yourselves, and make your site worthy of inclusion on the Open Directory Project.

And as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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So:

There’s a war on people and at stake are customers not just visitors. When people chase search engine rankings the first casualty is effective web copy that’s aimed at real human beings. Robots don’t yet do our shopping so why write for them?

Sadly the robots seem to be winning. How many web pages do you see that are bland waffle plastered with repeated, repeated, repeated words in bold? Make you want to read through, let alone buy from or sign-up to it? Of course not, it’s nothing more than spam and who trusts spammers?

Real SEO wouldn’t stand in the way of customers at the expense of visitors and neither should your web copy. You see, not only is usability and legibility important but so is trust and copy that actually sells!

Top 5 ways ‘writing for SEO’ ruins your copy

• The aforementioned plague of bold and spamming your keywords and phrases
• Sterile and mechanical non-style — nothing more than filler for robots
• Trading powerful headlines for ‘<h1> robot fodder’
• Forgetting a call to action — robots never click ‘buy’ do they?
• The shotgun approach with writing aimed at robots, missing every human visitor

Turning the tide in this war against machines means understanding a simple truth – real SEO shouldn’t mean sacrificing the power of words. Of course it can be a bitter pill to swallow and the choice is yours… You take the blue pill and the story ends — you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. All I am offering is the truth, nothing more.

Real SEO doesn’t mean making sacrifices.

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