A Dated Introduction to Online Marketing*

*Note: This is the original version of a whitepaper that was authored in 2001 by iCondotta's founder and principal consultant, Stephan Aarstol. It's a useful primer, but dated - pre-Wikipedia (2001), pre-Google AdWords PPC (2002), way pre-YouTube (2005), you get the picture...

Online Web Directory Strategy

One of the fundamental changes that the web has brought about is that it has empowered people. No longer are people limited to spoon-feed information. The web has empowered them to find it for themselves. The major directory strategy component of online marketing is all about making it easier for prospective customers to find your website and your products and services.

Getting listed in the Major Directories

Getting listed in the major web directories is a much safer bet than getting listed by the major crawler-based search engines because there are real people involved. If you’re a believer in picking the low hanging fruit first, this is where you should start.

There are two major directories to which every site should be submitted: Yahoo ($299/yr fee), and The Open Directory (www.dmoz.com), which is free. Each directory’s submission guidelines are unique, so you need to manually take the time to figure them out. It’s well worth your trouble. If your time is valuable, consider paying the $79 for a subscription to the Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com), which comprehensively covers submission strategies for the major directories as well as the major search engines.

Getting listed in Specific Directories

For any topic of interest, there are numerous topic-specific directories. The major directories do a good job of categorizing the whole Internet, but they fall far short of being able to provide the level of detail and comprehensiveness that the 1000s of expertly moderated, smaller topic-specific directories can provide. In fact, as higher and higher quality versions of these topic-specific directories surface, the search path of many web surfers becomes two-tiered; the first level is using the major search engines and directories to find the best of breed sites for any topic, the second level is using the directory resources of these best of breed sites to quickly drill down to editorial and community recommended resources.

Obviously, these directories are unique to each topic and research will need to be done to identify the relevant ones for your company and your products and services. Keep in mind that these are not only website directories, but company directories (with or without websites), product directories, and service directories.

Three things that you need to do for every (Major or specific) directory submission is:

1. Ferret out which category (or categories) in the directory is most appropriate for your site.
2. Make sure your site doesn’t have any pages “under construction,” as directory editors will usually not give consideration to sites that appear to be incomplete.
3. Provide a concise description of your site and leave out all the propaganda.

>> Search Engine Strategy

Authored in 2001 by Stephan Aarstol
while Director of Business Development
at AuntMinnie.com