DMOZ – or the Open Directory Project
Until recently, DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project to give it its proper name, has been a bit of a secret amongst internet marketers. If you don’t know, the Open Directory Project (ODP) is a large, categorized directory of websites – take a look at www.dmoz.org. There is no charge for listings, but every website added to the directory has to be reviewed manually by a volunteer editor before it is included.
Many internet marketers disagree, but I still believe that it is worthwhile getting your websites listed in the ODP. Few people use the ODP directly for searching in the same way that Google is used, so the directory itself is not of great value in generating traffic to your websites. But, the ODP data can be downloaded by anyone to use as the basis of a web directory; indeed the Google Directory is based largely on ODP data.
A listing in the ODP gives you many thousands of links to your website including one from the ODP itself and one from Google Directory. These links frequently add one to your website’s Google Page Rank.
Getting a website listed in the ODP takes time and can be very frustrating. When submitting your website, it is vital to spend time finding the absolute best category for it. It is likely that your submission will be deleted if you submit to the wrong category.
Use your website’s name for its ODP title. Then provide a good not overly flowery description. Your description must adhere to any ODP submission guidelines exactly for your chosen category. I suggest that you take a good look at the descriptions of websites already listed in the category for an idea of what the editors are looking for. Do not pack the description with key words. “Natural language” seems to work best.
Using an email address from your site seems to work better than using a non-site email address.
Once you have submitted your website there is not much more that you can do. If you wish, you can check monthly to see whether your website has been included; it is very unlikely that you will receive any email notification from the ODP. If your site has not been included, do NOT re-submit it as this seems to slow down submissions appreciably.
Good luck.
