Finding the Specialized Directories, Specialized Directory Submission, Promote your site by submitting in relavent Directory

Finding the Specialized Directories

For just about every subject you can imagine, someone is running a specialized search directory. Although specialized directories get very little traffic when compar compared to the Googles and Yahoo!s of the world, the traffic they do get is highly targeted, just the people you want to attract. And such directories are often very popular with your target audience.

Here’s an example of how to search for a specialized directory. Suppose that you’re promoting your rodent-racing Web site. Go to Google and type rodent racing directory.

Hmmm, for some reason Google doesn’t find any directories related to rodent racing. Strange. Okay, try rodent directory. Now you’re getting somewhere! I did this search and found several useful sites:

The IRD . International Rodentfancy Directory: “An international listing of PET rodent breeders, shelters, vets, stores, pet sitters and more! This service is brought to you by Rodentfancy.com and the Rat and Mouse Fanciers for Excellence . . . free to your business or service’s listing to the directory!” This site’s home page has a PageRank of 5 and an Alexa traffic rank of 302,000.

NetVet’s Electronic Zoo: This is a big list of links to rodent-related sites, though mostly related to research (the Digital Atlas of Mouse Embryology and the Cybermouse Project, for instance). But with a PageRank of 6 and an Alexa traffic rank of under 5,600, it might be worth your trying to get listed. Perhaps you can suggest that your site is related to research into cardiovascular performance of rodents under stress.

Rodent Resources at the National Center for Research Resources: Hmm, this is another rodent-research site, but with an Alexa traffic rank of 284 and a PageRank of 9. Getting listed in this directory would be very useful. (Maybe it’s time to apply for a research grant.)

The Rodent Breeders List: This directory strikes me as one of those “not very pleasant, but somebody’s got to do it” things. Still, if you breed rodents for your races, you may want to get onto this list. When you do a search for a specialty directory, your search results will include the specialty directories you need, but mixed in with them, you’ll also find results from the Yahoo! Directory, Google Directory, and the Open Directory Project. If you want, you can clear out the clutter by searching like this: rodent directory -inurl:yahoo.com -inurl:google.com -inurl:dmoz.org

This search phrase tells Google to look for pages with the words rodent and directory, but to ignore any pages that have yahoo.com, google.com, or dmoz.org (the Open Directory Project) in their URLs.

Note that some of the specialty directories you find actually pull data from the Open Directory Project. For instance, I found the Rodents Directory, which is part of Directory.NET (www.directory.net/Recreation/Pets/Rodents). This directory looked very large and professional, but upon further investigation, I discovered it was using the Open Directory Project data.

You certainly want to be listed in this r rodent directory, but in order to get into the directory, you need to get into the Open Directory Project itself.