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I’ll be the guest on The Best People We Know Radio Show (Motivational Radio Show) on: February 3, 2011 and at 7pm (EST). We will be talking about:

• marketing
• search engine optimization
• website design
• graphic design
• social media
• …and more

Host Deb Scott

Deb Scott is an award winning author of, The Sky Is Green & The Grass Is Blue -self help book- and a certified professional coach and motivational speaker. She is a terrific host and an incredible person. If you have not meet Deb, make sure to visit her site (motivational website).

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Submitting To DMOZ – The Open Directory Project

Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

If you are going to submit your site to the DMOZ directory (Open Directory Project), it will require studying the DMOZ rules on how and where to submit your site. When I say study, I mean …STUDY. This is no exaggeration! Sure the DMOZ dragon (Their Logo) looks cute, but don’t be fooled. This little DMOZ dragon will eat you up, spit you out and never look back after rejecting your website.

So if submitting to the Open Directory Project is such a terrible experience, why bother? Who cares? Is it just pride and bragging rights, or are there other reasons? Yes, pride and bragging rights are always motivation, but there are a other (perhaps more important) reasons why submitting to DMOZ is worth your time:

• Search engines, like Google, use it as part of their ranking system that can help grow traffic to your site.
• Organizations take advantage of free access to the directory’s content to populate their websites, providing additional exposure across niche communities.
• A listing in DMOZ will get you listed in the Google Directory.
• And yes, bragging rights.

Is Your Site Listed In DMOZ?

Since it is not my goal to unnecessarily torture you, before you begin this process go to DMOZ to search for your domain. To do this, search from the DMOZ home page for your domain excluding the “www”.

If your site was not found, but you are still interested in getting your site listed in DMOZ, the first thing to understand is DMOZ is a human edited directory. That’s right, a human editor. An editor who I imagine is ringing their hands together as they pick-a-part the submitted website for typos, missing graphics and broken links. These editors are not just glancing at your site, but evaluating the sites content, or lack-there-of. So “take your time” and double check your sites links. Make sure to go through your site, removing under construction pages and symbols. From this warning comes my advice: start by reading the rules on how to submit to DMOZ; and don’t submit unless you have a few hours.

DMOZ Rules To Submit

Free Link Checker

Once the official DMOZ rules have been read, take a moment to reflect on your site and what needs to be done. As you begin to prepare your site for review, do not assume anything. Check you site with a link checker and use a spell checker to review your site’s pages.

W3C Link Checker

Free Browser Checker

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but overflowing text that makes navigating a site difficult will hurt your chances of getting approved. The best way to ensure your website is displaying properly cross browsers is to use a free browser checker. One note on using BrowserShots, select only the primary browsers or it will take a long time to receive your results (screenshots).

Check Website Pages

The Open Directory Project

I’m sure you are beginning to see that submitting to DMOZ is not a 1-2-3 process. However, hopefully any issues regarding your site are addressed and fixed. Once your site is ready, it is time to concentrate on actually submitting your site. As you may have guessed this process is also filled with potential pitfalls, so make sure you are well rested before proceeding.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed, you are ready for phase two -information gathering. Luckily, in the fight to get your site listed I found an online quasi insider who has shared some great tips. Our informant is an editor of DMOZ, whom provides some tips on submitting to DMOZ.

Finally, here are a few other DMOZ resources:

DMOZ blog

DMOZ forum

Lastly, if you have a teen or kids specific site, on November 14, 2000, the Open Directory launched the Kids and Teens directory. DMOZ Kids and Teens

If you have a story about submitting your site to DMOZ we would enjoy hearing from you. Or, if you know of any other resources please comment below.

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If you don’t tweet, you may want to start. Why? On May 6, 2009  CNET news reported on Twitters efforts to improve their search engine. Specifically the news article reported:

…in a one-on-one discussion, Jayaram [Twitter's new VP of Operations who until recently, was VP of Search Quality for Google] confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

cnet logo

The New Twitter Search

This improvement to Twitter Search will have two effects.

It will keep the existing users tweeting and it will increase the number of new users. The bottom line is, an improved twitter search will make Twitter more valuable at a time when Twitter and Social Networking are seemingly everywhere.

Twitter Search

Tips on Using Twitter

There are a lot of ways to use Twitter. Let us know how you use Twitter. Is it for business or personal? Do you use Twitter for branding? Or, do you tweet your latest blog articles? When you comment on how you use Twitter make sure to include a link to your twitter account and tell us what you think of Twitters new search.

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SEO Tips- Domain Names and Inbound Links.

I want to give you a tip on how a professional SEO firm optimizes for inbound links. Most SEO firms will say a domain name should have your keywords in the title. This is true. Having a keyword phrase in your domain name title is a good search engine optimization technique for improving your sites organic ranking in Google. But beyond this SEO tip, having keywords in your domain name has another direct benefit related to Inbound links. In SEO a professional seo consultant will stress, you want your Inbound links to use keywords. This is also a great seo tip, but how about when you don’t have a choice? That’s right, some websites will just add your domain name and you don’t have an option (or opportunity) to modify the linking text. This is when I know, as an SEO consultant, that having a keyword phrase in the domain name can really add some extra punch to inbound links and organic seo. I want to stress that:

having a domain name that includes a keyword phrase will make it possible for every inbound link to enforce a keyword, especially when you do not have an option of adding the linking text.

There is one last point that I want to addressed regarding domain names. There is a growing trend that Google seems to be adding value to a brand, or branding. I mention this as a reminder that your brand is also a very important consideration and your domain name is a very good way to enforce your brand. So don’t stuff your domain name with keywords, making your domain name spammy; this will only hurt your efforts.