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The Company

The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), is owned by AOL Time Warner, (Netscape) and maintained by a global community of human Volunteers, it is one of the most comprehensive directories on the web. Based on the spirit of the Open Source movement the Open Directory is supported on the concept of 100% free submission. The Open Directory supplies directory information to some of the largest search engine services on the Internet including Google, Netscape, AOL and Hotbot.

Charges: The Open Directory is a human edited directory, meaning that all sites listed in the directory are reviewed by human editors. Open Directory best resembles a vast reference library where information is arranged hierarchically by subject from broad to specific detail. Maintained by human volunteers who act as experts to evaluate what sites are accepted and which are excluded. Interestingly enough, the editors have no control over individual category rankings, they either let you in or keep you out.

Getting your site listed in the Open Directory is crucial, since their results contribute if not power many of the major search engines on the web.

Suggestions and Tips for Best Results

Because this is a volunteer-based editing and inclusion service, it can take up to 8 weeks (sometimes 6 or more months) to get listed in The Open Directory. Once there, it may take additional time for the listing to be recognised by the search engines. You may be rejected by the category editor without explanation, but the common cause is often that you do not offer unique content to the topic.

Find the categories relevant to your content (site rule is a maximum of 2) and submit your company, your content must be suitable for the category. ONE thing to remember is that just registering with The Open Directory does not assure an improvement in your search engine ranking.
 

Previous Page: Introduction to an Overview of SEO

Company: Google was incorporated in 1998, within three years Google was conducting more than 200 million searches a day and averaging just under 300 million in 2009. Their stated mission is to refine and create the perfect search engine that, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Additionally, with a strict focus on infrastructure Google configured thousands of linked PCs into one of the world's largest Linux clusters to revolutionise searching on the web. There obvious success has set a standard that has all other search engine companies scrambling to catch up.

Technology Type - Crawler: The index contents and search results are compiled by spidering or crawling the web. Google crawls and spiders the web to maintain its vast index, with a growing emphasis on content, content relevance and link popularity.

Important factors determining your ranking on Google are:

• Content and Keyword inclusion
• The number of links that point to your site;
• The quality (popularity) of the sites that link to your site;
• The text in and around the links that point to your site;
• Who you link to;
• Google's web crawler mainly reads the visible text on your page - other search engines may read additional information from the page;
• Meta Tags – Description and Keywords, contra to believe Google are interested in these Meta Tags;
• Google penalises spam and spamming websites;
• For a higher ranking on Google your website should be listed on Open Directory Dmoz www.dmoz.org (see the Open Directory section for more information).

Free Website Promotion: Google maintains its own spider based index as well as maintaining and sourcing from an Open Directory. Google employs what is called 'PageRank Technology' that performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. They evaluate the quality of inbound links (people who link to you) and outbound link (people who you link to) assigning a value to the quality (popularity) of your links. Google PageRank is the measure of a page’s importance in Google’s opinion. PageRank calculations are based on how many quality and relevant sites across the Web link to this page. The higher the PageRank of the referring page, the more weight this link has.

Paid Website Promotion: With Google’s Adwords you can customize your own advertisements to drive traffic to your website by paying Google each time a user clicks on your pre-compiled link. This form of promotion is known as cost-per-click (CPC) and should be closely monitored to ensure value for money and a good ROI (return on investment).

Next Page: The Open Directory Project ...

Online search services mainly fall into two categories, directories (such as Yell, Thomson Local, Find Us In Spain.com etc) and search engines (Google, MSN/ Bing, Yahoo etc); some people confuse the two or don't recognise the difference as they appear to provide the same or similar user experience. For the purposes of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) it is important to acknowledge the different strategies required for optimising placement in search engine results provided by the different search services.

It is important to note that the search and directory services trade and exchange information in a web of commercial arrangements. Being aware of these relationships provides global perspective and aids the planning of a strategy for SEO activity.

A reference for these relationships may be found in this Search Service Data Relationship chart (scroll over each logo to see the data relationships between the various search services). Understanding these relationships and considering them in conjunction with your own business objectives for engaging in SEO activity in the first place, should provide the foundation for an effective SEO strategy.

Different techniques are required for SEO for directories and search engines and these techniques further differ between services in these categories, the rest of this publication will focus on SEO for Google as this is the service currently of principle commercial interest in the UK. The information provided in this publication does not take into account Pay-for-Inclusion and Pay-for-Placement arrangements.

Next Page: SEO for Google ...


 

Over the next 5 to 10 days I shall publish a series of articles giving an overview of Search Engine Optimisation (English spelling) and what you should consider before implimenting SEO on your website. Read more in the Overview of SEO Section...