What were they thinking?

We’re often left scratching our heads when reviewing submissions or category suggestions wondering what people were thinking when they submitted.

It’s not uncommon to open the review queue of our art directory and be presented with a screen full of real estate sites, hotels, insurance services and other assorted sites unrelated to art.

Maybe it’s me but I would think that the title of the site, Art Web Links, is a good start as to the subject matter, not to mention the complete lack of categories for real estate etc.

With World Site Index we almost daily get requests for a real estate category to be added to the real estate category, this would give Business / Real Estate / Real Estate. We really can’t figure this one out, a visit to the real estate category shows that it’s broken down into more specialised sub categories such as real estate agents.

Then we get to the submissions where the title and description are stuffed with every variation of their keywords they could think of, they obviously expect to be listed but not in World Site Index.

Finally we get to the business or e-commerce sites that have a perfect submission, the site looks stunning but nowhere is there any contact information apart from an email address or contact form and in some cases not even this. No phone numbers nothing.

Why do we want to see physical contact details? Well apart from it being a confidence boost to your customers and required for UK companies trading online, it save us having to deal with your irate customers who are contacting us in desperation because the only contact information they have for your store is an email address and for whatever reason all their emails are bouncing.

With the internet being global it never hurts to include your country, there’s more than one town with the same name in different countries.

So you want to get your site listed in a directory, then give it a fighting chance:

1. Check the subject matter of the directory before you do anything, if it’s an art directory and your site isn’t about art don’t waste your time submitting.
2. Locate the most appropriate category for your site, look at the other listings in the category and see if they are on the same topic as your site.
   Remember directories usually start with general topics and as you go deeper the topics become more specialised, you should be looking for the most specialised category available. Site search can often help.
3. When completing the submission forms, if asked to enter the business name as the title for the listing, do enter it, don’t go entering all your keywords it’s a waste of time and probably no one will even look at your site when they see spam in the review queue. There’s several thousand more listings waiting to get in.
4. Enter a well formed description about your site or business as requested, the description field isn’t a place to stuff keywords that’s what the keyword field is for.
   Think of it this way would a visitor be more tempted to visit a site if they are presented with a list of keywords or a neat concise description of what you offer?
5. Different directories have different requirements for submission so read what they write, ignoring it will most likely get your site ignored.

If after your best efforts you find a directory is missing the category you require then in most cases you can request it. However put some thought into it, requesting a category of the same name as its parent will most likely get you nowhere.

Final tip is if a directory sends you an acceptance email don’t add the email address to your mailing list, there’s nothing more annoying than getting an inbox full of product information.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 5:40 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.