DMOZ has been in the directory section for a while now, it’s the first link directory that came up and since then it has become the largest human driven web directory. Very often listings in Dmoz are used by search engines and they’re given more importance in search results.

Website promotion starts with directory submissions. DMOZ is FREE but it’s not easy to get a listing there, due to thousands of reasons, and first of all because there are millions of websites waiting for approval. To avoid waiting forever you shoud take some time to find the best category possible for your website. Then you MUST use your company or website name and write a good description.

Submission guidelines are very important, they may change depending on the categories, so make sure to read those very very carefully and make exactly what they say. Very often people just get their websites deleted just because they didn’t take their time to read the guidelines.

DO NOT submit again and again, your submission will be put at the back of the review queue if you keep submitting, or be deleted altogether! Don’t get fancy with the description, yes, try and incorporate your main keyword phrase or phrases, be careful though, too much keywords may look like crappy spa.

The description should adhere to their submission guidelines perfectly. You may compare it with other websites in the category you’re submitting to.  This way you can clearly see what exactly editors of this category are looking for and how can you make it look more natural. Make it short and to the point. Also, be sure to use an email from your site, like webmaster@yoursite.com.

This may help the editors know that this is a legitimate submission from an important person in your company, as opposed to if you use name@gmail.com as the submission email address. You don’t need to worry about being spammed. It’s unlikely you will ever hear from DMOZ via email. So use your real email address from your domain.

You won’t receive a confirmation if your site is accepted or not. Again, don’t submit it twice. Check in the category if your site is present or not. Note that sometimes sites get approved within 6 months or more. So don’t hurry so much, simply submit and wait.

If the category you are submitting to does not have an editor listed AND if the category doesn’t have a lot of listings, preferably less than 50 consider applying to become an editor of the category. As editor, you can approve your own site into the category very quickly.

Be honest in your application, the DMOZ people will research the information you give them, if you lie, you won’t get approved. If you are approved, be an honest editor, giving competitors a fair shot to be listed. You wouldn’t want a competitor keeping you out of the directory if they had the power, would you? Login a couple times a week to review new listings and to keep your editor account updated.

I hope those little tips will answer some questions I’ve been reading lately in most of the forums. But after all don’t worry so much about DMOZ. Your site still can be alive and gain visitors and pay back, even if you’re not listed there. I wish you good luck with your submission.

Tips for getting your e-commerce search engine friendly & search engine optimized:

The search engine spider needs to crawl through the site to index all the webpages. These webpages need to be presented to the search engines without a session ID and a query string. Also the product title should be in the filename for greater search engine success. A webpage address of http://www.mysite.com/productid=12456&search=t&PHPSESSID=da794… is not likely to be picked up in all the search engines, as the session ID will change with each individual visitor (and could end up with 100’s of variations of that webpage). But http://www.mysite.com/coffee_table_1234.php will. This can be achieved through direct hyperlinks through to the webpages or by using a dynamically created sitemap.

” and “The title tags are one of the biggest factors in determining search engine success. Yet as most e-commerce sites are dynamically generated, there are many sites where the title tag is the same of all the product pages. Between the “” should be the product title, with the most important details followed by typically the model no. The same relevant details should be added for both category and static webpages within the site.

Each product, category & static webpage should individual Meta tags. Your e-commerce should allow you to enter individual meta tags for each product, or automatically create them from the product title & description. Though the majority of search engines grab information from the webpage, rather than the meta tags, the reality is that some engines still do use this information.

With these enhancements built into your e-commerce software, your e-commerce website has a much better chance of exposure in the search engines, have all your webpages indexed and accordingly will push up sales. Paul Roberts

Search engine optimization is a polished art to bring your website in the top ranking of various search engines. If you think that simply posting your website on the internet is enough than you are quite unaware of the power of the SEO services. SEO campaigns are meant to attract the millions of consumers that are out there surfing. It provides a solid way to improve your website’s ranking on the web.

There are several ways in which you can more effectively target your prospective customers. The first option you have is through paid search engine listings. Several companies offer a bidding program where you can virtually bid against other companies for sponsorship listings on most major search engines. Each time your competitor’s price goes up, you have the option of increasing your bid as well.

Tactics of Search Engine Optimization Many years ago, listing keywords in the code of a website is considered to be enough to attract search engines. These days when the competition is on heights and more than a million businesses stationed on the web, the competition has grown fiercer. The right combination of keywords may help a website to rank well in various search engines ranking, but it definitely won’t give you an advantage over the competition.

Finally, search engine optimization can be acquired through carefully crafted content. Using commonly used search terms within the content of your site, can help attract prospects. This method relies on the popularity of the search terms among surfers, and the density of your optimized content.

The term white hat originates from old western movies where the good guys wore the white hats and the bad guys wore the black hats. Today the term white hat SEO refers to ethical search engine optimisation techniques and black hat SEO refers to unethical approaches.

White hat SEO follows the guidelines set down by the search engines themselves such as naturally linking to others sites and not buying links which the search engines don’t like. If a link to another website has to be bought it’s not a true vote for that website, as it has been placed there only for financial gain and not because the link would be of genuine interest to the websites visitors.

The use of keyphrases can also be considered white or black hat as white hat SEO’rs will use keyphases in the natural context of a body of text, if you write your web copy for your visitors and not the search engines you will achieve better results.

Black hat techniques involve keyphrase stuffing which tries to fool the search engine into thinking that a page is of more relevance because it uses the keyphrase loads of times. The search engines have algorithms for detecting this and can penalise a site for using these techniques.

A white hat company will never try to hide anything from their clients; they will always keep them involved as much as they can in the SEO process and never mislead them in how they achieve their results.

If you are looking for a white hat SEO company that only ever uses ethical SEO techniques I would recommend these people as I have used them on a few of my websites and always found them to be very upfront with what they do and how they do it.

It is always best to research a company before using them and read up about some of the terminology used in this industry as it will give you a better understanding on what is involved in search engine optimisation.

One other thing to look out for is price, if a company is offering cheap services this could mean they are cutting corners and using black hat SEO to achieve results, as search engine optimisation can be a long process which can take months before the hard work pays off. So be wary of companies that claim they can get quick results at knocked down prices.