Is It Worth Submitting Your Site To The Directories

Directories are very popular and are widely used by people as a source of information. Web crawler search engines may also have better chances of finding your website if it is listed with any of these directories. Most of the directories charge a fee for listing your website. Some sites such as Yahoo offer free submission as well.

An important aspect of submitting your website to a directory is to have a 25 word or less description of the website. This allows the web crawler search engines to efficiently find and include your website.

Yahoo and Open Directory Project are some of the most popular directory services on the World Wide Web.

Yahoo provides two submission options:
Free submission known as "Standard" and paid
submission known as "Yahoo Express".

The free submission cannot be used for commercial
websites. Also, with free submission there is no guarantee that your website will be approved for submission.

Submission of commercial websites can be done with Yahoo Express that has a fee of $299 per year. Although a majority of websites are accepted in this category, note that, paid submission also doesn't guarantee acceptance of your website. It only ensures an answer whether your site was accepted or not. For non-commercial websites there is a one-time fee of $299.

For submission of free non-commercial websites you will have to fill up a submission form that is displayed once you click the "uggest a Site" link at the bottom of each category. In case of paid commercial websites you would have to fill in the submission form.

Having your website listed with Open Directory is essential. It provides results to Google, AOL, Lycos and Netscape Search. Open Directory doesn't have a paid submission service. Commercial as well as non-commercial websites can be submitted to Open Directory absolutely free of cost. This, however, has its drawbacks.

There is no guarantee if and when your website will be approved for submission. Having mentioned that, Open Directory does generate high traffic for your website, once approved. Thus, submission to this directory is worth the uncertainty involved.

Submission can be done by using the "Add URL" link at the top of each of the categories. Generally, if your website is accepted, it would appear within the directory in about three weeks' time. If rejected, there is no limit to how many times you can resubmit your website.

These are three most important Directories on the World Wide Web. Getting your site listed on each of these is a must as it can lead to a significantly large audience for your website.

The maximum length of the Title of the website should be 60 characters for Yahoo and 100 characters for Open Directory.

Description of your website is essential for submission to any Directory. The maximum length
of this description for Yahoo is 25 words or 200 characters and 25 to 30 words for Open Directory.

Yahoo requires that you submit the Title, description, Your name and Email for website submission and Open Directory only require the Title and Description of the website.

Yahoo allows a maximum submission for one category per website; Open Directory allow a maximum submission for one category per URL.

At the moment the top ten search sites - meaning both directories and search engines account for just over 93% of all search engine traffic. The other 6 something % is made up of hundreds of sites claiming to be search engines. Even at that the 11th - 15th biggest search engines make up most of that figure.

So what are the search sites you need to concentrate on?

Some of the top search engines are discussed above. There are a few others which are also quite popular.

The following is a suggested list of search engines and directories.

Yahoo.com
Dmoz.com (ODP)
Looksmart.com
Google.com
Alltheweb.com (Fast)
Inktomi (AOL, Hotbot, MSN + more)
Altavista.com
Lycos.com
Teoma
Overture.com (GoTo.com) Paid Inclusion
Directhit.com
Askjeeves.com

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