Beside search engine submission, you can also have your site submitted to major directory or local yellow pages. Among them, we strongly recommend DMOZ open directory. Though no one uses DMOZ to search for information because of its underdeveloped search technology and limited search results, major search engines use DMOZ as their “base” for crawling since the directory only lists quality sites.
The bad news is that it may take two weeks to six months for your site to be listed. It is ridiculous that when you care much about being included, it takes longer. When you just submit your site and do not do anything more, it may take only a couple of weeks. However, it is still worth submitting.
The other directory is the traditional portal site, such as Yahoo. Listing in Yahoo’s directory is not free. You will be charged $299 per year. Also, once your credit card is billed, your money can’t be refunded even that Yahoo does not approve your site.
Typically, traffic from Yahoo directory (not Yahoo Search) consists of 0.1% to 0.5% of all your site’s traffic. Therefore, in the regard of traffic, it is not worth submitting. However, like DMOZ, listing in Yahoo directory is helpful to your PageRank and Alexa’ Ranking. And of course, search engines will crawl Yahoo directory to index the sites.
If your site’ domain name does not contain any keyword of your site, it is difficult to get a high ranking (say top 10) in Yahoo search engine ranking because Yahoo puts much weight on the title when deciding which site to show first. Please note that when you submit your site to Yahoo, it is Yahoo who determines what title to use, not you or your site real title. In most cases, Yahoo will use your site’s domain for showing title (on the search result).
For example, if your company is doing management consulting business, and you registered a domain name EdwardMNC.com, then your site will be listed as “EdwardMNC” or “EdwardMNC.com” even that it actually means “Edward Management Consulting Company”.
If you already owned a site and do not want to register a new one, the alternative is to list the sub-page not home page to Yahoo directory. For example, “EdwardMNC: Human Resource Management”, at this time, Yahoo may list your site based on the title you provide.
The bottom line, if you don’t want to pay $299 per year, or just are not sure whether keyword will be shown in the title, just disregard the Yahoo directory. Your site can be ranked high on its search result by exchanging link with other sites that was indexed by Yahoo search engine.
