There have been many discussions about how registering with DMOZ affects your sites ranking. However, the majority of Search Engine Optimisers (SEO) will agree that registering with the DMOZ directory will help your site significantly improve in the search engine results. It's not always going to make the biggest difference to your site but on the whole it should help your site jump up quite a few places. Even if it does nothing for your site, it is still a link back to your site.

There are two common ways to get your site listed in the DMOZ directory. The first is to try and find your relative category; this is by far the hardest way to go about registering your site with DMOZ. Speaking from experience, I would not suggest this way as people almost always get their DMOZ entry in the wrong category. This will delay your insertion into DMOZ by months and months.

The second way in which you can apply to get your site listed in DMOZ is by going through your regions until you find your specific town or city. I would certainly suggest going about registering your site with DMOZ in this manner.

When registering your site with DMOZ, you will be asked to fill out a little bit of information about your website. Make it matter of fact as if it was another person describing what your site offers. Avoid words that promote your site, like best, leader, brilliant etc. DMOZ does not want sales pitches in their descriptions they simply want to know what your website has to offer. Since I am an editor as DMOZ, I can confirm that having to rewrite website descriptions does not motivate me to registering a particular site. I usually do all the websites that don't need much work and then get around to registering the ones that do.

As of writing this article DMOZ has been out of action for almost two months, this has stopped any new websites being registered. It is assumed that DMOZ will be back online and accepting new website submissions by the beginning of 2007.