While at first glance, it might seem that website owners and directory editors have conflicting interests — a closer look reveals that they may be somewhat simpatico.

Directory editors simply want to preserve the integrity of their directory and their directory’s results pages. They want description to accurately reflect a site’s content without the marketing hype. However, website owners don’t necessarily want to remain objective when crafting site titles or descriptions.

Upon closer inspection, it appears that website owners and directory editors actually do have the same aim. As a website owner, you maintain complete control over your domain — both figuratively and literally. You would not want to be coerced into changing your content by a third party. However, directory editors must deal with hundreds of strangers every day doing just that — asking directory editors to display results that are often full of hyperbole and hype. At the same time, these directory editors want to preserve the quality of the directory.

You should be aware that a directory editor sees hundreds, if not thousands of submissions every week. By following their guidelines and examples, your submission is lees likely to be rejected.

After you have determined the most appropriate category for your site, review the descriptions listed therein. Check how many words, for example, the directory editor generally allows.

Here at LinkPlug!, we allow descriptions to come in at 500 words — a fairly generous amount. While you want the style of your website description to match the other descriptions in your content category, the description itself should be unique. Hence, if your company differentiates itself thought the marketing of a unique product — now is the time to mention it.

Editors want to know that each website accepted is offering the directory user unique and valuable  information — users do not want the same information delivered to them again and again via search results.

Moreover, do not “stuff” too many keywords into a website description. Directory editors and people who use the directories themselves do now want to read a list of keywords — they might be good for automated visitors, but don’t play well with humans!

A good suggestion for building a website description (and at the same time appears to meet the needs of directory editors and website owners alike is the following simple formula:

(KEYWORD 1) firm specializing in (KEYWORD 2), (KEYWORD 3) and (KEYWORD 4).

In closing, remember that when writing your descriptions for directories, editors are most likely to view your index (home) page first. Hence, on your home page, editors should be able to immediately discern the products or services that you’ve highlighted in your description. If editors are unable to make this determination, in all likelihood they will reject (or modify) the description.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under Hints & Tips. 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.