As a website owner or developer, you probably already spend a lot of time trying to get your website to the top of the listings on all the major search engines. Yahoo and Google are, of course, the most popular and effective places to be seen. However, there are others as well which you may not heard of. One of the oldest search engines, and one that is significantly different than the others is DMOZ.

Originally known as Mozilla, DMOZ is a project that is completely run by volunteers and is an attempt to catalog the web in a way that makes sense and is fair to everyone. Because all submissions are evaluated by a human (rather than crawled by a “spider”), there is no real way to bluff it. You can’t force your way to the top by submitting over and over again, because every time you submit, you are put to the end of the line.

One of the biggest concerns with DMOZ for most web developers is that it can take weeks or even months to get your website listed. This is a long time in the internet world, and if your website is timely or related to a news event, it may not be listed in time.

Although it should not be at the top of your marketing plan, DMOZ should not be omitted when you are submitting to search engines. You will probably not get a lot of traffic out of it, but your presence on the site will show up on the other search engines. Your best bet is to spend your marketing efforts and programming time working on getting your web site to the top of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the other more mainstream search engines, so that you can get quality traffic that brings in sales.