Submit to directories, please help....

[carpetpaul]

Hi, could I please ask 2 questions:-

1, I've started trying to submit my site to some directories, I've never done this before. I've been asked to provide a description, what purpose is this for, is it going to be displayed in some way to the people who serach for my site, or is it purely for the people at the directory to decide if my site is suitable for inclusion in their list ? - do I need to write this description in the acturate formal manner that you would require for displaying to potential customers or is it just to be a straight to the point information for the guys at the directory ??

2, The first submition to a directory went fine, however the second asked for a compulsory 'Reciprocal Link URL', what is this ?? - is it a requirement of one link from another site ? - in which case, could I use my free isp webspace to point toward the site that I am looking to promote ?

Many thanks for reading this, please post a reply !

Paul

[LiLcRaZyFuZzY]

as far as i know, directory themselves are not so important, what makes it important that ur listed in the dir is that major SE look for links in directories like the open dir project( http://dmoz.org )
at a relatively high frequence.
For the description, if u found the category that suits u best, maybe look for concurrent sites and their description.
For the reciprocal link, no problem to give the url of ur free webspace, but i dunno if its usefull for ur other site, it would be better if u could get a link on a highly visited page

[PeOfEo]

dmoz.org is wonderful. It basically feeds right into google msn aol and some others because they are spidering dmoz all the time. Dmoz is the worlds largest human edited directory so your site will generally end up where it needs to be and there are plenty of editers so it is generally very timely. I used to be one of their editers myself but I was not very responsible and did not like waiting till the end of the week to find a pile of sites I would have to look at and move to proper categories etc, so I resigned.

[carpetpaul]

a 'very' knowledgable friend advised me not to submit to dmoz yet, he said that this one is very important and that I must submit to it carefully for best effect. I'll do some of the less important directories first and then when I've got the hang of it, I'll do dmoz then.

P.S - you still don't make it clear what the description is used for, is it simply for the people at the directory or will it be viewed in any way by people visiting my site - sorry I don't understand this, I find it a bit hard as I'm quite new to web design

[carpetpaul]

is there any chance that 'PeOfEo' or anyone can post up for me the correct code required to make a link in my signature to my site www.cleveleyscarpetcentre.co.uk using the anchor text 'Cane Furniture' ??

Any help, most appreciated, thanks --- Paul

[LiLcRaZyFuZzY]

Cane Furniture (http://www.cleveleyscarpetcentre.co.uk)

something like this?
[<space>URL=http://www.cleveleyscarpetcentre.co.uk]Cane Furniture[/URL]

just take out the <space>

[PeOfEo]

DMOZ editors look at content. All you need is to look for the appropriate category for your site, make sure the content fits it, and make sure your description is clear. Have any information the editor needs to know ready. When I worked with dmoz I would often email the site's submitter and have to ask for more information. If he or she did not respond the site just sat on the unreviewed pile. After a week or so I deleted it. But if you have good information the editor will just click the okay buttton. It is not a big challenge getting into the direcotry. On the directory you are not worried about any ratings, the sites come out in alphabetical order when you browse it. You are only concerned with ratings from the actual search engines, which look at your code + your content. You want your markup to be clear and accessible and the relevant content to be readily available to the spiders. Spiders dig a nice clean site with the content right there... css can be a strong ally in the quest for search engine ratings.

[carpetpaul]

I must admit, with my site bieng aimed at our business selling cane conservatory furniture and carpets, rugs etc, I have a lot of images and not a lot of text. I have included as much text as I can, but there is only so much you can say, then you have to start showing images. All my images have an 'Alt' desription, I've got good descriptive titles to all pages and meta tags for index.html
I don't suppose that I can increase the amount of text pages much, although I will try, I'm always likely to be a site with more images than text content. I have around 250 files in total, around 200 of them are images, I hope this wont hold back my page ranking in the long term too much

Question - should I include meta for each page ? - or if the meta information would be the same (or similar) for each page, is it not worth it ? - is meta still important for search engines ??

Thankyou for your time - Paul

[PeOfEo]

I would put them on every page... but not physically. If you are using a server side language you can just run an include. I include the top of all of my pages, and most of my layout. I have my pages very simplified so each page is basically just the contnet and include tags surrounding it.