By Elmer on May 29, 2009

DMOZ or Open Directory is an online directory often mentioned by search marketers, as one of the most important directories to get listed to. Having a link from DMOZ, a website theoretically gets a boost of link popularity in hopes of achieving higher rankings on search engine results. Submission to DMOZ is free, but as with many other free offers it may take a long time before a site gets listed. There are no guarantees of getting listed at all so we could end up waiting for a directory listing that doesn’t happen ever because our site was rejected and we were never notified of such rejection.

As mentioned in the first sentence, DMOZ has always been a target of search marketers so it’s often associated with SEO work in the field: create submissions that are keyword-rich as if DMOZ won’t display the listing in the absence of certain keywords. We should remember that DMOZ is a directory. It is intended for human visitors to navigate through directory categories more than a rich list of links for search engines to crawl. So how do we go around getting our site listed in DMOZ sooner than later?

Consider the following:
* If you use keyword-rich titles, don’t ever think that your listing gets more clickthroughs
* Submission to DMOZ is primarily intended for human visitors

As editors don’t really like submissions whose sites are obviously made for rankings over a good user experience, it is much better to put less emphasis on placing excessive number of target keywords and focus on using attractive page titles and descriptions.

Photo credit: mfichtner

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