Why Is It Important?

What's the big deal in getting your Web site approved for inclusion in a directory?

If your website gets included in a good directory under a relevant category, it is a good link pointing to your site. Such good links could directly and indirectly help you get more visitors to your site.

Good directories have plenty of visitors and if they are looking for information under your category, they could come across your site and follow the link to it.

Additionally, many good links pointing to your site make the search engine robots give a higher rank to your site. And this in turn could mean that your website appears in the first one or two pages of search results – something that could mean far more traffic compared to appearing in the fourth or later pages of search results.

So getting approved for a directory listing is indeed something worth striving for.

What's the Problem in Getting the Approved?

Search engines use software “spiders” to crawl the World Wide Web and bring back websites. The content thus brought are analyzed by software “indexers” and almost invariably included in the search engine index (even if it be in the four hundredth page).

These software spiders and indexers can work at electronic speeds enabling them handle millions of sites that are being added.

The situation with directories is quite different. Your Web site is reviewed by a human editor, and assessed as worthy of inclusion or rejected. This is a slow process that cannot handle all the millions of sites that need to be reviewed, assessed and categorized.

There is also the problem of human inclinations. People, including directory editors, like different things. What one editor likes might not be to the liking of another. Also, motives other than the worth of the website often influence the decision.

In such a situation, getting your site approved for inclusion in a directory can be a tough task. However, you can do several things that make things easier.

Follow Rules and Guidelines

Good directories try to minimize the impact of individual editor's biases by implementing a set of rules and guidelines for review, approval and rejection. Read each directory's rules and guidelines before you submit your website to it. Following the rules and guidelines could enhance your chances of approval.

You can work with your own website before submitting it. Some common rules are listed below. Ensure that your site complies with these:

Do all the links on your pages work? Check for and rectify any broken links. There are link-checking software that could do the job for you, and they are mostly free.
Is your website complete? Directories do not like sites under construction. Make sure that there are sufficient numbers of pages for the site to do what it seeks to do.
Avoid duplicate or mirror pages. Pages copied from other sites and duplicated at your own site create a poor image and typically lead to rejection.
Ensure that the content of your site is appropriate for the directory you are submitting to. Most general web directories exclude adult, hate and copyright-violating sites. Niche directories accept only sites that belong in their niches.

Now come some common guidelines for the submission process itself:

Submit the top-level page – Home Page - after ensuring that it includes navigational links to other important pages. Directories prefer to see the site as a whole and not just some individual page.
Drill down to the most appropriate category to which your site belongs and click the Submit URL link under that category. Each category has its own editor and that person might reject sites that clearly do not belong under his or her category.
Provide the specific details each directory asks for. These typically include a Name for your site, its URL, a brief Title that clearly tells what your site is about and a Description with specified character or word limits to describe your site in a little more detail.
While writing Title and Description, avoid hyperbole and sales pitch. Instead, try to give an interesting but objective description. Also, prepare descriptions of different character lengths in advance so that you can use the one that is allowed in a particular case.
Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes in the Title and Description. Directory editors do not like the additional trouble of correcting these.
Some directories ask for a reciprocal link. Consider whether the kind of link they ask for could be provided in a relevant manner from your website.
Many directories ask for a payment for reviewing your site quicker (or reviewing it at all). Look at the value of a listing in that directory and decide whether to pay or not.


And Hope for the Best

In the case of directories like DMOZ, even complying with all the rules and guidelines could not ensure that your site would be indexed (or even reviewed). They have a huge and ever increasing backlog of sites pending for review.

Volunteer editors compile DMOZ and for many categories there are no editors.

You might have to wait for years before your site is reviewed, if ever.