Interview with a DMOZ Editor
July 27, 2007
Open Directory Project, popularly know by its DMOZ by webmasters is “The Web Directory”. Its not only free to add your site to it, but once your site is listed in DMOZ, hundreds of smaller web directories including Google Directory get some or all of their data from DMOZ. This means a site listed in DMOZ is guaranteed several listings in smaller web directories.
DMOZ like most projects are usually beset by all sorts of problems, but the question uppermost in most webmaster minds is usually “why is my site now listed” or
“When will my site be listed”? In a recent Interview, Temi Odurinde put some of the questions webmasters like addressed to a DMOZ editor. The full interview can be read at UK Webmaster World Forums. Excepts from its can be read below:
UK WW: The big crash DMOZ was supposed to have had wiped off lots of database, can you shed lights on this?
DMOZ Editor: The crash affected mainly the editing side of things, very few listed sites (if any) were lost. The only dater lost was sites waiting to be reviewed by an editor or those unreviewed due to being faulty. Many editing notes that are included when an editor adds/edits or deletes a site were also lost.
UK WW: I know DMOZ has a comprehensive list of things you should do to get your site listed, can you simplify it to just 5 tips you think could help one get listed in DMOZ quickly.
DMOZ Editor: Use the correct title, not the one best for your SEO purposes.
1)Use the correct and main url (if your site is www.acme.com/ submit that not acme.com/sales this just delays things more.
2)Write your description from an outsiders point of view, don’t repeat any keywords and avoid hype. Ensure the correct use of caps and don’t put your title in the description.
3)Make sure your submitted site is complete and has no dead pages. Sites submitted incomplete, under construction or with dead links etc will be rejected.
4)Ensure your site is submitted to the correct section of the directory. Remember the bigger the category you submit to the longer it will take to get listed. If for example you are a web designer and your site fits Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Full_Service/ this will probable take a great deal longer than say a walk in shop located in Florida with 20 or so sites listed. Locality listings require a location address and do tend to get listed quicker.
UK WW: Some members of our forums said to put the following questions to you:
Question: Why are they not accepting directory submission while they have tons of crap blogs and buts listed there? What is wrong with directories?
DMOZ Editor: If you are referring to web directories please see http://dmoz.org/Business/Directories/ This is just a small section of directories listed.
UK WW Member: Most of the time directories are well edited and well look after. Yet they only list directories affiliated with editors only. What is wrong there?
DMOZ Editor: This is a misconception, editors are required to inform the OPD of any affiliated sites and display their own sites for all editors to see. Any editor manipulating a category or refusing to add competitors sites will have all editing privileges removed.
UK WW Member: What is it different from personal blogs, made for adsense blogs, proxy sites, etc?? What is the justification?
DMOZ Editor: Ad sense sites are aimed at redirecting the viewer for the purpose of financial gain only and consist of links to other sites only. These are not considered of any factual quality. Sites containing partial ad sense are acceptable providing they are not the soul purpose of the site in question.
UK WW Member: What should I do to get my sites accepted, since I read the guide and followed them every time, but no success so far
DMOZ Editor: See above 1-5 suggestions.
UK WW Member:
My question is, how many urls do they have waiting for approval?
DMOZ Editor: Not an easy one to answer, the directory has approximately 4,830,584 sites listed and over 590,000 categories calculating those waiting for approval would mean checking all countries of the world individually and then totalling them. At I guess I would say around 200.000
UK WW Member: Why is there such disparity in accepting editors? I have seen an application rejected, then a few weeks later the identical application submitted by a different person and they were accepted. I personally was refused 3 times, yet have written 5 applications for friends who were accepted as editors and are doing a fine job. This tells me that personalities come into play more than the quality of application.
DMOZ Editor: Many factors determine the acceptance or rejection of editor applications.
Appling for too big a category being the first. Chose one that has less than 50 sites and no editor, possibly your home town. Then apply for another town when that category is cracked and you have learnt the ways of Dmoz editing. Slowly moving up the ladder is the only way.
Incorrect submission examples, poor spelling, bad abbreviation, incorrect titles/url’s etc are another reason. Always check you examples are not already listed in the directory, submitting listed sited shows you have not looked that deep into the directory sites included.
Don’t expect to get in on your first attempt however good your application is, rejection is part of your learning to be not only a good editor but one that has good and polite communication skills. Politely reply to the rejection email and try again.
Remember Dmoz wants new editors but will not except you simply to clear sites. The quality of listing takes priority over quantity.
Sigsell – Making the most of forum signature
July 26, 2007
Building a solid amount of traffic these day’s isn’t easy and as we all know it can become very costly to website owners. Finding the cheapest way to get the most reach to a target market is always every website owners dream.
We all know of multiple ways to advertise a website if you have the appropriate budget but what happens to the smaller sites when the budget isn’t there and they cannot afford to advertise with these big name company’s? They get lost and most of the times end up giving up or just not making it at all due to little or no traffic. Sigsell help small to medium, advertisers with this problem introducing a new and fun way to get your website to your target market and at an affordable price. www. sigsell .com is dedicated to allowing users of any forums to sell their signatures if permitted by the forum administrators of the specific forum where the signature is available for Auction. sigsell is all done in an auction environment so you have full control over what you can spend or what you’re willing to spend.
Selling Forum Signatures is starting to revolutionize the marketing and advertising industry allowing small to medium websites to possibly get the same reach as large websites at a reduction of the cost. Feel free to give it a try yourself; what’s the worst that can happen? You never know you just might get a really decent deal right considering the site is new and the competition for bidding is currently low.
Don’t ever count your website short if you have no visitors, it’s only because no one know you’re there and this is a cheap and easy way to market your website and increase traffic.
Bid for Position V Keyword Tags
July 22, 2007
Fashion come and go on the high streets, same on the Internet, fashion and trends comes and goes. Recently, perhaps just under two years or so, keyword link tags were the in things, in the site promotion world. You choose a keyword, that keyword is linked to your chosen URL.
Unlike web directories, tagged keywords are not arranged into categories, they all appear on the homepage of the keyword tag site along with about one hundred or so other keyword tags that may or may not be linked to a URL.
Link tagging gradually faded into oblivion as bid for position directories become more popular and take keyword-tagging place.
Bid for position is replacing link tags fast. In the past, if you do not want to start a full-featured web directory, link tag is the lightweight alternative, very quick to set up, does not require too many parameters to configure. Now, bid for position is an easy to set up as link tag directory.
Another reason bid for position web directories are being favoured over link tags is revenue generating potential. A decent link a tag site should not have more than ninety-nine links on its homepage. By the time most link a tag sites reached forty links, it start looking scrambled and ugly, not may people would pay to have a site listed on such site.
With Bid for position directory, the revenue generation potential is endless because of multiple categories; each category can list ninety nice sites and still be compliant with Google preferred maximum link per page.
Bidding directory, like most form of bidding, be it in real life or in the virtual world pitches one person against the other, as one person tries to out bid the other to stay on top of the front page, this helps the bid for position owner realise maximum revenue for his website.
You can discuss this post at Webmaster Forum
UK Reseller Web Hosting :(
July 17, 2007
I have three new UK based clients I am doing SEO projects for. I wanted a UK based hosting company I can host a few sites as part of my Internet marketing work for the new client. This calls for a new web hosting space since I want the sites hosted on servers with IP address range that are completely different from the IP address range my current sites are hosted on so, out I go into cyber land to shop for a new UK reseller hosting account.
I am looking for a reseller web hosting account, not because I want to resell web hosting but because reseller web hosting usually allows multiple domains to be hosted on one hosting account. You can guess where the search started; Google.co.uk.
To keep this post short, I will only discuss five of the companies I considered during my shopping around. They are a mixture of companies found through organic search result and some via sponsored links.
The first company on the three top sponsored links were Heart Internet, Daily and Webfusion.
Heart Internet reseller package is fantastic, I already have a reseller account with them, as I said earlier I wanted an account from a company with completely different UK IP address range. I will recommend Heart Internet reseller package for anyone considering UK reseller account, its not perfect but its much better than most of the other reseller package out there and their support is good.
SEO Friendly Web Design
July 16, 2007
Nowadays the Internet marketing gets bigger and bigger share from the budget of the marketing departments. In my opinion, the best opportunity in the online promotion is that it let you to compete effectively with much bigger and stronger companies in order to gain the confidence of the potential customers. You need to to grab this!
With the following guide i would like to help you a little to compete more succesfull with your new website or to transform an existing one to make it much more powerful in the online search engine marketing arena.
Content
Firstly, i would talk a little about the content. It is very easy to write effective content for search engines [i know it because i have done it many times] but i doubt that your products are aimed at crawling robots.
No matters whether your site is profit oriented or you want the visitors to sign up for your newsletter or you simply want to provide them some entertaining online, you certainly must have an aim. You need to build up and structure of the content keeping in your mind your ultimate aim.
Using the different keyword tool such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool or the DP Keyword Generator you may select those words or expressions, which may drive you organic traffic through search engine results.
You need to lead the visitors using the sentences and pictures to make them do what you want them to do. Don’t worry about the keyword density; this is not an issue anymore. Write convincing and enjoying natural content, structuring clearly using headings [<h1> ....<h3>]. Once you are ready, test it with as many people as you can.
Search engine optimisation is mainly composed of keyword research and positioning your website and web pages with [external and internal] links and the <title> tags. I will deal with the links a little bit later, but at this point you need to remember that you must write expressive, short and keyword rich unique title tag for every single inner page. This is an effective way to diversify your keyword basket.
One of the best feedbacks about the quality of the content beside the selling volume can be the “number of downloaded pages/ visit” statistic ratio. You may get this data using almost every web tracker service [Google Analytics, Statcounter etc.]. You must try to maximize this value and don’t forget your aim.
