Chapter 17: Building Traffic and Being Found
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Lycos). To join the former, you go to the sites and fill in a form with a brief description of your page or site. The latter services are easier. You simply pop over to these sites and add your URL to their databases.
Joining a directory site In this section, I explore each type of registration more closely and then visit with Microsoft’s Submit It! service. Submit It! announces your site to dozens of these search systems and directories for free.
Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) Of the many sites that offer a comprehensive database of other Web sites, my favorite is Yahoo!, which was created by then-Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang. Filo and Yang developed Yahoo! as a mechanism for maintaining their own ever-growing list of cool Web sites, and the site grew so fast that their two UNIX servers couldn’t keep up with the load. Today, Yahoo! is a media empire with a wide variety of businesses, partnerships, and plans. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, as the company has spun off into different busi nesses, it’s become harder and harder to actually have your commercial site listed in the Yahoo directory without paying a substantial amount of money. Have a site that isn’t commercial? Then, theoretically, it should be free and relatively speedy to add it to Yahoo!’s directory. To join Yahoo!, find the appropriate category in the Yahoo! online directory and then click the small Suggest a Site link at the top right of the page. Yahoo! prompts you to choose one of these two options: Yahoo Express (a $299 fee whether your entry is chosen for inclusion in Yahoo! or not; seven-day turnaround) or Standard Consideration (free; no indication of how long it takes to evaluate your submission and include it in the directory). Pick the latter. Fill in all the blanks within the provided form. Your site will then be added after the administrative folks have a glance at your entry to ensure everything is accurate and the site is appropriate to the Yahoo! system.
The Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org/) Initially created as part of the Netscape open source browser project, the Open Directory Project (also known as DMOZ for its domain name) is a great alternative to Yahoo! with faster entry inclusion and administrators who actually maintain the links in a given category. To add your site, navigate to the appropriate spot in the directory, and click Suggest URL in the topright. The form asks for a few key items of information, including URL, site title, and site description, and then submits the form to the appropriate category editor. If that’s not sufficient for your interests, don’t forget that you can volunteer to become an edi tor at the Open Directory Project, which would then let you help manage a key online resource area dedicated to a specific topic that you’re particularly interested in or knowledgeable about. Volunteering as a category editor is also a great way to join a thriving online community and help the Web grow. To start, click Become an Editor on the home page.