DMOZ.org has to be the number one online directory to get your website submitted to, as well as appear in.  It has been around almost as long as the internet has.  Unfortunately as it gets so many submissions each day, it can often take months to be listed, and sometimes you may not get listed.

The sooner you submit your website to the DMOZ directory, the better.  However, I would make sure that your website is in a completed state before you submit it, even although it may take months to be listed.

As with all the traffic generation and backlinking strategies you carry out for your business, some will give you immediately results and others will be much slower.  Also there are strategies that will bring short term results and others that bring in long term results.  Submitting your website to not only DMOZ but other directories should be thought of as giving a slow but long term result.

When submitting your website, make sure that you choose the category that best fits your business and only submit your site once, to only one category.  If your website is found to be breaking these rules not only will you not get your website submitted, you will probably be banned from submitting other websites.

Also when submitting your website, don’t use over the top promotional words in your submission description as you will end up being rejected and you don’t want to have to wait months to be included again.

The DMOZ is administered by real people who volunteer to look after a certain category, or categories, and manually approve the submissions.  If your category doesn’t have a volunteer looking after it then you may find it’s even longer to get your submission accepted.  One way to get around that is to volunteer to administer that category!  To volunteer, just fill in the volunteers form and send it off and someone will get back to you with more information.

SEO stands for search engine optimization and what this means is that you are creating your website in such a format that the search engines will love your website more because you’re following what they are looking for.

With WordPress the default settings for urls (the string of either words or numbers) that come after your domain, called permalinks, isn’t very search engine friendly.  The first thing you need to do is to change the permalink settings to a more search engine friendly urls.  You can do this simply by going to Settings and then Permalinks.

When you go the permalinks settings, you will have a variety of choices, whether you want to have the date included in the url or whether you want something or nothing else.  What I usually do, is to only have the post title showing.  However there isn’t an obvious choice for this so you need to be a little creative!

When you click on one of the other options the code will appear, just delete the date code that appears so that only the post name code remains, which will look like this /%postname%/.  That’s it!  Now instead of seeing your posts as yourdomain.com/?p34 it will show with the search engine friendly urls.

This step should be one of the first things that you do with your WordPress website and certainly before submitting your sitemap to Google and the other search engines as you don’t want your website to be indexed with the non-seo links.

For those of you just starting off with WordPress, perhaps this is the first WordPress installation you’ve ever done, one of things that is often missed out is that the WordPress default privacy settings are set to allow visitors to view your website but not for search engines to find you.  This can be a major problem if you don’t change these settings, however it’s very easy to change.

I’ve fallen foul of this new default setting before.  I’d completed a new WordPress website, submitted it to several directories and search engines, used some high ranked social media sites to create some backlinks, submitted my sitemap to Google, as well as installing Google Analytics, yet even after a week it still wasn’t showing up even although I was searching for the domain name.

Knowing it was something simple, I tried everything I could think of and spent way longer than I should have trying to solve it.  I’m hoping that this blog post will save you hours of frustration and allow you to get listed on the search engines quickly – using the techniques you will find here on this site!

If you think you know how to do it yourself then I would encourage you to try that first (it should take you no longer than 60 seconds to do it).  The best way to learn is by doing, as well as through trial and error.  If you have no idea and just want the answer so that you can get on with other things, then here goes:

Go to the Settings menu and scroll down to Privacy.  It’s in this setting that you can simply change the settings from “show only visitors” to “show everybody”.  Told you it was simple but not exactly obvious for those installing WordPress for the first time.

GoDaddy is probably the largest domain registrar on the internet.  It’s where I get most of my domains from.  I’ve had many clients ask me how to change the name servers at GoDaddy and that’s why I’ve created this blog post as a reference for all those who ask the same question in the future!

Just incase you don’t know what name servers are and why you would want to change them, I’ll explain.

Imagine you sell icecream.  Without a domain or hosting you are standing in a dark room on your own and nobody can see you, with your icecream melting!  Now you go and buy a domain and a domain is like an icecream van, it’s somewhere to sell your icecream from and tell people about your fantastic icecream.  However the problem is, nobody can buy your icecream or know about you yet because you keep moving and never stop driving around.

That’s where hosting comes in.  Getting a hosting account means that you have effectively bought a permanent pitch for your icecream van.  You can tell people where you are now.  You can put some chairs and a few tables infront of your icecream van for your customers to sit and enjoy your icecream.

You need both a domain which will also be classed as your url, and hosting so that you can effectively start your online business.

To change your name servers on GoDaddy you need to log into your GoDaddy account and choose the first menu option “Domains” and then “My Domains” just like in the image on the left.

You will then be presented with a list of your domains, or you may just have one if you are just starting out!

Each domain is hyperlinked, which means when you click on it, it will take you to that particular domains settings and from here you can change the name servers that you will be given from your hosting account.  They will more than likely appear something like ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com.  The ns part stands for name server, and most hosting companies use that prefix to make it easy for you to know your name servers.

Choose the name servers option which appears along the top menu of your new screen and the screen below will appear.

From here you will see the different options you have available and it’s the bottom option you are interested in.  Here is where you enter the name servers that your host has provided for you.

Click ok and then that’s it changed – simple!  It can take anything from a few minutes to a few hours for you to see the changes take effect.  I use GoDaddy and Hostgator combination and it usually just takes a few minutes to change.

Once it’s changed you want to go into your control panel (cpanel) on your domain and install WordPress or whatever program you want, as soon as possible, as not doing so can leave your hosting account open to spammers.