So your website is built and you ready to launch it on the World Wide Web. You have primed it with good, competitive SEO keywords, given it a clear title tag, alt tags are all in order, navigation menu structure is polished to a T. At this point you feel that you could do little more before cracking the champagne over the bow and delivering the sucker.
But, before popping the cork, there is one final ‘trick’ which can help your brand new digital pup get the teething it deserves – submitting it to the Open Directory Project…
The Open Directory Project (ODP), commonly known as Dmoz was established, back in the day, by the pioneering web company Netscape. In a nutshell, it is a directory of World Wide Web links curated and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. Websites are submitted, by their creators, to Dmoz who in turn verify their content according to what topic, category, etc, it has been submitted under.
Dmoz’ clout is held in high esteem, by Google, Bing and the like, for obvious reasons – there is a respected human element behind its database, and it’s free. Clearly, a great advantage to search engines who find an honest organised listing of websites handy in contributing to a positive search ranking for their users.
Another way to clarify all of this is to think of the web like the Earth, floating in space, and all of the 100’s of thousand satellites that are surrounding it in orbit. When the space race kicked off we began pummeling the earth’s orbit with satellites. Satelites, like most commercial materials, have a lifespan. So, the problem is that a whack of these satellites have given up the ghost, still up there, in Van Allen’s belt, and could be there indefinitely. Basically, there is a whack of space junk (spam) surrounding us.
The same goes for websites spamming the net. Today, websites are being birthed, some pooped, out onto the www at an exponential rate. Search engines need to sift through all the current websites that are relevantly being updated, catalog all the new ones, while wading through old spammer sites, then re-arrange the ranking of each according to search options. It is a mind numbing job best left to robots and clever algorithms. This is where Dmoz comes to the rescue. If a new website has been catalogued on Dmoz’ database and made available to search engines, they have an organised place to help them with their jobs.
So it helps, before launching your new website to log onto dmoz.org and register your website with them. You will be asked to define and categorise your website. Once submitted a human being will use his astute logic and make sure that you not bluffing them with marketing speak and verify your submission. Once your new website is catalogued, Google will get a whiff and you have a foot up.
