Directory Submission Tips

Helpful tips to get your website submission approved by directories.

Your Website

Your website should be complete. Websites under construction or that have dead links may not be approved because of that fact.

Your website should have a clean, uncluttered look to it. Websites don't have to be professionally done to look clean. Make sure your site is easy to navigate so that the directory owners (the ones who are considering endorsing your website) can check out your website easily.

Websites should not have popup or popunder windows. While we have not had many directories that have expressly stated this in their terms, it is a good rule of thumb. If a directory owner gets annoyed by visiting your website, there's a good chance your website will not be approved for inclusion in their directory.

Keep the ads & affiliate links to a minimum. You will not likely get accepted to a directory if you have a site overrun with ads or affiliate links. We will not even accept orders for websites that seem to be designed only to generate revenue by contextual ads (such as Google Adsense). If you want to add advertisements to your website we'd advise you wait until after the submission process & you've been included in directories.

Provide real content or a real service on your website. Unique content is best.

Submission Results

Always provide a valid, working submission email address. It is advised that you use one that will accept mail from many sources (maybe stay away from using AOL or RoadRunner email accounts, for example). Invalid submission email addresses almost guarantee rejection of your website.

When choosing a website title and description, do not use promotional language. Use descriptive words, but don't write an advertisement about your website as many directories will reject these. Simple, factual statements describing your service or website in a non-promotional manner works best with most directories.

Do not use all caps in your title or description, and do not capitalize the first letter of every word. This will cause your submission to be rejected by quite a few directories.

When choosing keywords, choose keywords that best suit your website. Do not include non-related keywords as some of the directories that require keywords will reject submission if the keywords are not related to the website itself.

Submission Information

Be prepared to wait. While some directories will review your website within a few days of submission, other directories may take as long as 1 or 2 months. We try and weed out the directories that take a long time for the review process, but it is not always apparent when a new directory is added to our list on what the review time will be.

Results will not happen overnight. However, within about a month you should start seeing the results of the submission process, and a few months down the road the fruit of the submissions should start to be showing even more.

Hopefully you have found these tips to be helpful with preparing your website for submission. If you have any questions feel free to let us know.

To break it all down in an easy to understand fashion we'll cover some of the benefits that directory submissions can have:

  • If your website is not being crawled by search engine robots

  • Your Google Pagerank can increase. (if you're into that sort of thing)

  • Your website link popularity can increase (more backlinks)

  • Your website can get more thoroughly indexed by search engines (get more pages in search engines) due to the directory submission process.