Open letter to directory owners...

Dear Directory Owners,

I appreciate that you allow me to advertise my website within your directory. I have a new website and am trying to establish my keywords and grow my pagerank and am truly thankful for the service you are offering.

I am visiting your sites and submitting my website by hand. I truly understand your frustration when people do not follow your stated TOS and submission guidelines;  but, I would respectfully like to make the following suggestions:

* If you do not accept interior pages, please say so.
Preferably right on the form next to where I would put my URL. I just received an email from one directory thanking me for my submission, telling me my listing was removed and inviting me to ask them why it was removed. I am waiting on a response; but can only guess that since I submitted an interior page I was removed. I keep good notes of my submissions and look over a site before I register and particularly look for TOS and submission guidelines; this site had neither.

* If you allow me to submit a list of keywords; please indicate if I am to use commas or not. Again, best place would be right on the form. Some directories want comma separated, others do not, most do not state a preference leaving the submittor to guess.

* If you only allow a particular number of characters for a specific field; please state the limit and enforce it right on your form. One of the directories I submitted to chopped off the end of my site description in a bad place and my entry looks awful.

* If you use a graphic to show a code to enforce hand submits; please make the letters and numbers easy to identify. On one directory it took me six tries to finally match the code because it was impossible to identify a zero from a lowercase or capital oh, a one from an ell, and some of the letters were just plain unidentifiable.

I'm making these suggestions because I understand how time consuming it can be to maintain your directories and how frustrating it is for you when spammers hit your site. I make every attempt to abide by your policies; but that is hard, if not impossible, when they are not clearly stated. And, believe me, I do look for them before I submit my site.

I hope you accept my suggestions with the spirit with which they have been given.

Thank you again for the service you provide.

Sincerely,

ymc aka your message consultant aka michele

I completely agree. Also, another one to add:

Make sure your submit URL page works, and if it doesn't, provide me with some way to contact you and tell you it doesn't work. I've run into a couple sites whose submit URL page doesn't work and there is no notification that it shouldn't. There was a contact form on one of the pages, but THAT didn't work, and on another one, they gave me an incorrect email address. I can't help you if you can't help me.

~Crystal