Increasing Your Traffic with DMOZ

One of the best known and biggest directories in existence is probably the Open Directory Project (ODP), sometimes (most times in fact) known as DMOZ. This directory has been around for years and now lists over four million organized and categorized web sites. DMOZ has also been around for a very long time (in web terms). This directory is maintained by a huge number of volunteer editors that add new URLs of submitted sites to the relevant categories.

Many other directories on the Internet take content from the ODP, including Google, so getting your site into it can reap huge benefits as your URL will be shared with many other directories, which means that your site will have many more inbound links and therefore greater link popularity. There have been concerns in the past about volunteer editors maliciously not adding your site to the directory if it is in direct competition with a site of their own, but this was some time ago now and generally, as long as you're not a reseller, florist or have a site that is in some way illegal, you should now get into the directory once you've submitted your site.

There are other rules and guidelines of course, but the DMOZ site lists these in full, so familiarize yourself with the submission process prior to actual submission. As the directory is maintained by humans (it is one of the biggest, most distributed human edited databases in existence), getting your site listed can take anything from a couple of weeks to several months, and filtering through to the hundreds of other sites will take even longer. But don't let that put you off.

Another way of ensuring that you get into the directory could be to become a volunteer editor yourself in order to add your own site. While this may initially seem like a desirable scheme, don't forget that as a volunteer editor you will be required to spend time researching sites and adding them to the directory, so unless you're serious about being part of the DMOZ project, don't waste your SEO time doing something else. Also, if you just add your own sites to the directory and nothing else, your activities may well become known and any listings you've added may be removed. Directories, just like search engines, don't like being deceived! As with any form of SEO, honesty is always the best policy.
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