Today was exciting. I woke up and checked my email as usual. Well, I didn’t wake up until 12:30pm because I worked late the previous night. My doctor would be mad that I didn’t take my ritalin until afternoon

Anyways, I got an approval email for my DMOZ application. I deleted all of the spam, then proceeded to login to DMOZ and read, read, read… I wanted to soak up the knowledge of proceedures and tools available to new editors.

After I got it all down to memory I went ahead to my category. I noticed 7 listings that were waiting to be reviewed. I checked them all looking for missing pages, broken links, under construction, affiliate ads, spam, illegal content, and made sure they had quality original content. I approved a couple of them. There were some that weren’t appropriate for consideration at this time.

All in all, today was fun and educational. As time goes on I will try and expand my horizons and apply for another category. My goal is to be a meta or editall soon. It is fun to share your knowledge of quality websites and companies out there.

If you have been rejected as an editor, or never applied, don’t be discouraged. The Open Directory is worth your time. We can use more good people to create the biggest quality directory in the world! Just make sure you follow the guidelines EXACTLY when applying. Additionally, I recommend applying for a small category with less than 20 websites listed. You might consider a locality of a small town where you live or nearby, or a category which can be expanded but has hardly any listings. New editors are most likely going to be rejected if they try and apply for a category which is large. This is because you have to start somewhere and show the higher-ups that you have the ability to make quality edits.

I hope this has helped someone…

When doing search engine marketing (sem) you are going to obviously be building links to your website. But the key to a successful sem campaign is to make sure those links go deep.

There are ways of getting deep links. One of them is to find PAID web directories and submit your link to them for a fee. Make sure they allow a deep link and not just the main url of your website. It is also necessary to make sure the link is direct and not being generated by a php or javascript script. Search engines have a hard time reading those.

Deep linking will allow you to use different anchor texts in your inbound links. That anchor text should match the main topic of the specific deep link you are linking it to. This makes the inbound link much more relevant than having it link straight to your homepage.

By using deep linking strategies you are building PageRank to pages deep within your website. This will help inside pages to rank higher in search engines for your target keywords or keyphrases. It will also make the monetization of your website much more valuable in regards to advertisers.

The post title is pretty straight forward, however people do not understand that they must follow certain rules to get listed in directories like DMOZ for example. You can find the rules on the top of the categories at Resource Zone but people still go in there and complain that their editor application has been turned down or their website has not been listed.

If someone were to do a simple search in the RZ forum they will find literally hundreds of threads stating that they no longer answer submission status requests for websites. They can also easily find the guidelines for listing a website. You couldn’t imaging how many people ignore the basic rules and submit a website using marketing hype and keyword stuffing in their description. Maybe a spell check will help also.

Before you go post at RZ about how you hate them and you think editors are corrupt, why not do some research first and follow directions. In the end you have to understand that the editors are volunteers and they DO NOT have to add your website. They don’t even have to look at it.

An editors job is to find quality websites with original content that is useful to researchers using DMOZ. They are allowed to edit in their spare time and they are not paid. So show some respect.

Also, do not attempt to bribe an editor ever. Regardless of what you may have heard, if you bribe an editor and get listed, not if but when the editor gets caught he/she will no longer be an editor and all of the links the editor has added in the past may be deleted. Then you will have wasted the money you used as a bribe. Just submit your website once and make sure everything follows guidelines. Then forget about it. That is all you can do.

I will update this post regularly.

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