The ODP or Open Directory Project to give it it’s full name is located at www.dmoz.org In short it is one of, if not the most important website directories on the internet! A hefty claim but why, simply put Google base their directory on the work of the ODP , this is because it is entirely manually edited. Any website that is included in the ODP has passed a manual check for quality. Perhaps only Yahoo’s paid directory can compare, did I not mention than an entry in the ODP is free?
But how does this translate into money? The 2 websites I own that are featured in the ODP have higher page rank, more visitors and generate more revenue than the other 20 put together. If I go back over time and look at the chicken and egg scenario then I can clearly see that the jumps in traffic came after the inclusion into the ODP. Whilst the ODP generates very little if not nothing in the way of referral traffic, the extra page rank and exposure (many other websites “borrow” directly from the ODP) have resulted in better search rankings and more visitors. And talking of page rank, there are many advertising networks which pay more for higher page rank, Text Link Ads straight of the top of my head.
So the ODP is good, getting in however can be difficult. I’ve got a good track record of having websites accepted, stick to the following rules and you should stand a good chance.
- Make it original, an RSS scraped or website sourced from other sites is not going to pass manual checking
- Spell check, the quality of the information is all important, design is secondary to the ODP
- When submitting keep your title simple, either the name of your company or the name of the website, do not add keywords
- Your description should only contain what you are about and what your website contains, it’s important to avoid using this as an advert or keyword stuffing
- Look for a category that already has an editor, it may speed up your submission (think local)
- Only submit your website to one category, spamming is really frowned upon
Follow the rules and you should find yourself in the ODP. Although hard to measure I’m sure that being in the ODP has made my websites a lot more profitable than would they would have been if they weren’t in it.