By Jim Hedger

The casket was all but closed on the venerable Open Directory Project (ODP, or dmoz.org ). A December 16 blog post by an ODP founder, Rich Skrenta, “DMOZ had 9 lives. Used up yet?” , suggested that the directory at DMOZ is now, like Marley’s ghost, deader than a doornail. DMOZ was down and, for over a month and a half, it looked like it was down for the count.
In reality, DMOZ is not dead though the rumours of its demise were not exactly exaggerated either. Because this six-week unscheduled outage followed several years of consumer dissatisfaction, lagging editorial energy, and layoffs at AOL, many made the logical assumption that the plug had been pulled.

By Kim Roach (c) 2006

Yahoo was started in 1994 by two college students named David Filo and Jerry Yang. They started Yahoo as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Nevër did they imagine that their online ventures would turn into one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.
The Yahoo directory quickly gained popularity as the hot spot for finding useful Web sites. In the fall of 1994, Yahoo had its first million-hit day, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors. Today, Yahoo is one of the top sites on the internet, receiving over 345 million visitors every month.

The proper use of search engines is an extremely critical aspect of online marketing. The search engines are the initial way that prospective customers can locate your site. That’s the reason link popularity is so necessary. If your customers can’t find you, you’ll never see any sales.

You may be asking yourself “What is so popular about links”? Well, the short answer to that question is “A lot”. The phrase “Link popularity” alludes to the ranking given to your web site by the search engines. It decides what position your page is given by the search engines when people search for certain keywords contained in your site. You’re probably asking “How do I make my link popular?”

By Andy MacDonald :: Swift Media UK

Treat Yahoo as both a directory AND a search engine. Yahoo offers a number of different search results. Part of their search results come from an actual search engine, and some of their results come from human editors, called surfers.
Every Yahoo directory submission is viewed by a person. (Search engines use spiders and indexing software). Admission into the Yahoo directory is entirely at the discretion of the Yahoo surfer viewing your site. That’s why the free submission lead time can often be 8-10 weeks, without using the Express Submit service.

By Robert Fuess (c) 2006 Spiderweb Logic

Many of you have heard of submitting your website, but what does this really mean? What places should you really submit your website? What about submitting to thousands of search engines and directories through some website promotion service?

What Pages To Submit:

At the minimum, you should submit your home page. Many search engines will promise to find and crawl the rest of your website automatically (in their own good time). But if they don’t discourage you from doing so, I would submit several of the important pages in your site. For example, a site map is definitely something I would want to submit, since it should have direct links to the rest of your website.

Written by David Utter for WebPronews

The habit of going to a search engine has become so ingrained a behavior for Internet users that many input names like eBay or Yahoo into a search box instead of the address bar of the browser.
A lot of users have home pages set to various portals, like Yahoo or MSN or Google, all of which contain a handy search box on the page. To get to a well-known destination like online auctioneer eBay, quite a number of those users type eBay into the search box, hit Enter, and then click on the link to the site that appears on the search result pages.

By Robert Fuess (c) 2006 Spiderweb Logic

Many of you have heard of submitting your website, but what does this really mean? What places should you really submit your website? What about submitting to thousands of search engines and directories through some website promotion service?

Microsoft is planning to release an assault on the search advertising industry this coming June, according to the Associated Press. Pulling from the Chinese research leg of the company, the Beast of Redmond aims to add highly targeted and contextual next-generation search marketing technology to its weapons cache to continue its bout against the new nemesis found in Google.

Being in the shadow of another company is certainly not something Microsoft is used to. Sure, Sony gave the software company a proper thumping with PlayStation 2, a hard lesson that propelled an aggressive dropping of Xbox 360 gamer bait in time for Christmas. “In time for the holidays” was a strong left hook to Sony’s chin before the tech giant could throw out the monstrously high-tech PlayStation3. Microsoft is hoping an early attack put a crack in Sony’s glass jaw.

Written by Adrian Lawrence (c) 2005 and published in SiteProNews

If you are looking for ways to promote your website, then web directories should definitely be considered a big part of your promotional plan. Web directories provide web visitors with a one-stop destination on the web to find the information they are looking for. Further, in using web directories, you can increase the visibility of your website and derive myriad benefits offered by web directories.
Let’s take a look at the benefits that webmasters derive from web directories:

Written by Merle MCPromotionsPress.com for publication in SiteProNews

Have you ever wished for someone to come along and compete with “Google’s Adsense Program”? With the launch of “Yahoo’s Publisher Network”(YPN) you could say that some wishes really do come true.
If you’re not familiar with Adsense or YPN, both programs allow you to add specialized coding to your website pages and then display text-based ads which are related to the content on the page. For example, if you have a sports related website theme, then ads would be shown for sporting goods and services.