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After you’ve spent a few weeks building your website and doing your keyword research, optimizing the content for the search engines and getting your headers and meta tags into place, what else can you do to give your site a step up? One rite of passage that every budding website owner or SEO devotee needs to go through is the dreaded DMOZ submission. Whilst submitting your site to directories (and more specifically to DMOZ) is less important now than it was in recent years, it is still something that is worth doing. Unfortunately it is also a notoriously slow, convoluted and infuriating process that can often take years to get through and can see your site rejected many times without you having any clue why.

So why then do people put themselves through this tedious application process? Because getting a listing in DMOZ is still believed to be extremely useful as a marker for the search engines that your site is a site of quality. It is well known that DMOZ only accept quality sites and will not accept any sites that are bad links, because all sites are selected by humans rather than by computer. This is the reason for both the value and quality of DMOZ as well as the crazily slow submission process.

The key to having a site accepted by DMOZ is to offer a unique and interesting website, one that looks professional and is easy to use (although the design element is not paramount) and does not offer a copy of other sites. The first thing to ensure is that the site is finished. Every single page of the site should be complete and should filled with original content and information relevant to the category you are going to submit it into in DMOZ. Next, you have to go to the Open Directory Project Website and choose the correct category and subcategories for your website. A lot of people go wrong at this point. If you choose the wrong category (and there are many similar options to choose from) your submission will be rejected from the outset and you will have to begin the whole process again.

Once you have chosen the right category, fill out the application with constant referral to DMOZ’s own submission guidelines. These include not submitting mirror sites (those sites containing identical content with differing URL’s) or submitting sites that have similar content or the same content as other sites you might have already in place in the directory. Repetitive and overlapping content will always be rejected. Remember original content only! Never submit a site with a redirect built in to take you to another address. They’re not stupid. No illegal content, obviously. No sites made up only of affiliate links. They’re not that fond of affiliate marketers at DMOZ by all accounts. And lastly, as mentioned above, make sure it’s finished. No ‘under construction’ submissions.

Here’s the thing to remember. Good things come to those that wait. DMOZ isn’t the be all and end all of search engine optimisation and you can still rank well without it. Don’t obsess about it. Be patient and if you haven’t heard anything within say six months, try again in a different category. 

Alex is a journalist and copywriter. He writes about all kinds of stuff.