Directory Listings as Part of Your Private Practice Marketing Effort, Part 1

Free General Directories

Once upon a time, many sites tried to offer free general directories, but these days the numbers have dwindled; we'll cover just a couple of the more important ones here.

Open Directory Project

Now owned by Time Warner, the Open Directory Project (also known as DMOZ), remains probably the single most important and influential of all the directories edited by humans. The results from this high-quality directory are also carried directly by Google (where they are listed in a different order, according to Google PageRank). Submitting your site to DMOZ is essentially a no-brainer when it comes to marketing your private practice: there are tremendous advantages to being carried by DMOZ, and I can't think of a single drawback. Read the submission guidelines carefully, follow them to the letter, and be patient; it may take many months to secure a listing, and there is no guarantee that your site will be listed at all. Google takes DMOZ listings very seriously, and in fact they even make it known that if you've had difficulty getting listed in Google, one of the best ways of remedying that is to get your site listed with the Open Directory Project.

Unfortunately, some less scrupulous webmasters have exploited their positions as DMOZ volunteer editors to list their sites in the directory repeatedly, and not always with good reason for the multiple listings. While doing some competitor analysis recently on behalf of another major mental health site, I found that one DMOZ editor had listed his own mental health site 12 different times, with 5 of those listings for only a single page of information, explicitly contradicting DMOZ's stated policy on justifying multiple listings. This same site ranked on page 60 of the WHOIS hall of shame, dedicated to exposing abusive multiple DMOZ listings. (To be fair, this doesn't really compare to the number one offender -- CNN.com, which enjoys a whopping 231,782 separate entries in the DMOZ directory. I suppose it's probably just a wild coincidence that CNN is a Time Warner company...)

Setting aside such editorial abuses, however, in my experience DMOZ editors as a whole are extremely helpful and make every effort to play fair -- and that commitment to doing an excellent job is probably exactly why the directory has remained top dog for so long.

JoeAnt

Unlike DMOZ, JoeAnt restricts sites to just one listing in the entire directory. While this can make it a little harder to use (since sites often really should be listed in more than one category), it's refreshing not to keep finding a glut of the same old sites appearing over and over again. You can get your site listed in the directory either by paying a comparatively low reviewing fee, or by volunteering to become an editor and submitting it yourself.

In my experience, the JoeAnt editing process is a fairly prickly affair, with different reviewing editors seeming to take wildly different views of how the submission guidelines should be interpreted; but, then, some of these people have spent years reviewing literally tens of thousands of different sites, so their own personal influence over the shape of the directory is both very apparent and probably very important to them.

If you're considering becoming a JoeAnt editor, beware that the site provides possibly the worst system for handling the flow of reviews ever devised by humankind: plan to click and click and click through page after page if you want to get any work done. (I wonder what impact this has on the JoeAnt Alexa ranking, linked prominently through many areas of the site?)

Continue to Part 2...