Traffic-Building Must-Do: DMOZ

Jun 9th, 2009
by Kenn Schroder

As you know, a website is no good without visitors. If you want to
get coaching clients, sell products and get people to subscribe and
into your sales and marketing systems, you need visitors.

There are limitless ways to get traffic, but one very popular
and powerful way is to drive traffic to your website from search
engines. A big factor in doing that is getting links
from other websites to yours.

And the bigger and better the "other" website is,
the more valuable the link is (from the eyes of search
engines) - and hence the higher your rankings go.

It's completely like being in high school again. If the popular
kid says you are cool, well, then you're cool! If the unpopular
kid says you're cool, it doesn't buy so much weight. Yes, we are
in high school again.

So, who's one of the most popular kids on the internet? DMOZ.
If you have a link from DMOZ to your website, it says you're
website is very cool.

How so?

DMOZ is one of the largest and oldest human-edited directories on the Web. DMOZ is the Open Directory Project - is a multilingual
open content directory of the World Wide Web.

Because it's difficult to get into and because it's edited by humans,
sites that do get into DMOZ are seen as very valuable.

Websites submitted to DMOZ are judged by unpaid (volunteer) editors; these guys and gals aren't getting paid, they are in it to make the Web a better place with good websites. They want to keep the
integrity of the directory.

An editor's job is to accept good websites, properly categorize
websites, and avoid scammers and spammers. This keeps the directory nice, clean, and relevant.

But, getting in isn't easy because these editors are unpaid and tend to take their time. Also, some categories do not have editors - and if you submit to a category with no editor, you will have to wait for another editor to find time to handle your request.

By the way, DMOZ is here:
http://www.dmoz.org/

So here are the basic steps to getting into DMOZ:

1. Read the submission policies.
It's slow to get listed, so you don't want to make a simple
mistake and find out a month later that you have to resubmit! The
submission guidelines are here: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html.

2. Choose a category
The ideal category is the one that is most relevant to what you do.

For example, if you are a health coach operating in Washington and
many of your clients are local, then you will probably be accepted
into this category: "Top: Health: Alternative: Coaching: North
America: United States: Washington."

By being listed on this page, search engines will associate the words on the page with your website. And this page has lots of keywords that are relevant to your website such as Health, Coaching and Washington.

Go click through the categories to see where you would fit. Keep in
mind that you will probably be accepted into a category if you see
other coaches listed there.

3. Write a good title.

Your title will have to be your business name or website name. If you have keywords in your business or website name, then your rankings will improve for those keywords.

For example, if there was a coach whose business name was The Business Success Coach, they would have the keywords "business coach" in their name.

This is good because when your keywords are in the actual link
(the blue and underlined text) those words highly correlated to
your website and you rank higher.

If you don't have keywords in your name, don't sweat it. It's just one small factor in the grand scheme of things.

4. Write a good description with keywords in it.
DMOZ frowns upon copy with a lot of hype or exaggerated claims. They want you to submit non-salesy, objective, directly-related information about your website. 25-30 words long.

So, for example, if you are a business coach for accountants and you
help them with sales and marketing, then you could do this:

Business coach for accountants providing sales and marketing
consulting, articles, blog, report, and seminars aiming to increase profits. Located in Seattle, Washington.

Take a look at the other listings in your category to get a sense of
what is expected.

5. Mark your calendar to follow-up in two months. Check back in two months to see if you are listed. If you are not, contact
the category editor.The link to contact an editor is at the bottom of the category for which you submitted to. If you don't see an editor, go to the next higher up category.

In summary, getting listed in DMOZ, a valued human-edited
directory is seen as a big plus in the eyes of search engines, and
as a result your website pages will rank higher.

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