7. Directories and how to get your Gay Website listed

The Directories are just as crucial to getting traffic to your site as the crawler-based search engines. The main difference here for you is that the Directories involve human review of your pages, whereas the crawlers are automated.

When you submit (Yahoo refers to this as "suggest") a site, a human editor visits the submitted page and decides where the pages would best fit in their directory (if the site is listed at all. As with the crawler-based search engines, there's no guarantee your site will be added to a web directory.) Content and relevancy is paramount to ensure that your pages get listed to the right area of the directory.

The two major directories to focus on first are Yahoo! (and here all this time you thought it was a search engine!) and The Open Directory Project. Even though Yahoo has been eclipsed by Google in sheer volume of daily traffic, many people still use Yahoo as their default search tool and you Must be on there to be successful. (But all is not lost if you can't immediately get in. Read on…..)

The Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/about.html) seeks to index the entire internet AND offers free license to use their search capabilities on any site that complies with their use policies. For you, that means that if your site is listed in the Open Directory, your pages will appear in the searches on many, many websites across the net!

How do you do it?

Because Yahoo and The Open Directory Project are different in the way they work, here are the links to get more information on how to get your site within their databases:

How to Suggest a Site to Yahoo: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

Submitting to the Open Directory Project: http://dmoz.org/add.html

Take the extra time to read the instructions carefully for each (to make sure you're submitting your site to the correct area of their directories) and then go from there.

Yahoo may prove difficult to do as a free submission because they currently stipulate that they don't take commercial websites into their database. (You'll see plenty of commercial sites in a Yahoo search results, but Yahoo combines their own data with that supplied by Google, so there's no clear way at present to tell if you're listed in Yahoo, or Google when you show up in a Yahoo search. Either result, though, is GOOD news!) If yours is a "personal" or "informational" site you'll have better luck getting listed for free in Yahoo than if your site sells things or is an affiliate site. (Is it worth building a second, informational/personal site under a unique domain and then linking into your affiliate site?)

While you're exploring the Directories, why not do a lookup for "search engines" that might be relevant to your site's content. You'll find a lot of possibilities here as well to hand-submit your site to smaller, specialized search engines!