Are you having trouble finding just the right DMOZ category to submit your URL to? Do you think that your site would benefit from an extra listing in a different category on DMOZ? The benefits of listing this way include high PR backlinks, out-of-the-box branding, and ofcoarse, an increase in traffic.

But you already know why its good to be listed in DMOZ.

Times that by 2 or 4 or (if you can do it) even 4 and you are on the same track as this post.

The idea here is to gain more than just that single, high PageRank and trusted DMOZ link. Before we get started, there are a few things you should know.

• This is not a quick fix, Loophole, Scheme or Blackhat technique of any kind.
• This requires a TON of relevant content from a given blog and a lot of hard work
• You need to be able to edit your site’s theme (coding, not just images and colours)

Still with me? The basic idea is that a well structured blog, brimming with relevant and useful content, if it is able to categorize properly could be able to pass off its’ categories as mini-sites to directories like DMOZ. The mini-site is part of a larger network that makes up your website.

Many large scale sites that cover a number of topics, have their subfolders listed on DMOZ pages. It is a way to include websites that may not fit in so neatly in a major or sub-category.

Your categories must be well organized and, chances are, not all of them will be able to make it. I would recommend spending a few weeks building up two or three major categories (with sub categories or not) into strong groups of articles that could survive on their own blog.

i.e. If you have a website about Cats, and your categories are something like:

• Veterinarian Reviews
• Diet / Nutrition
• Famous Kitties
• Cats in the news

and say Veterinarian Reviews and Famous Kitties are packed with some of your best posts, you may be able to suggest http://mycatsite.com/veterinarian-reviews/ * as a URL in the appropriate category, and still maintain the link to your link in http://www.dmoz.org/Recreation/Pets/Cats/

*It is important that you edit your permalinks to read blog.com/category-name and not blog.com/categories/category-name/, which is the default.- Some background reading on permalink structuring:

change-wordpress-permalink wordpress-categories-in-permalink-structure-behavior

wordpress-permalink-customisation-caution-for-beginners

Another thing you must consider, is that each category template needs to be unique. Your main nav can still be there, but if al the sidebar links have more to do with the rest of the site than the category, chances are its not going to cut it. This could mean cutting Top comments, Recent and Most Popular posts right out of your sidebar. The best thing to do would be to keep those widgets on your Main Index Template, and arrange slightly different sidebars for each individual category.

A good place to start figuring out how to do this is Wordpress’ very own default theme. The default theme displays different sidebar messages depending on the page, type of archive, or category the visitor is in. Simply changing the markup on this sidebar function is a quick way to set up new and unique sidebars from within each topic.

Well thats all the blogging around here for today, Camp. Until next time. Oh and before I go, I just want to apologize to all the hard-working DMOZ editors getting a sudden slew of subdomain submissions from unlikely page-rank-happy bloggers who didn’t bother to read this whole article.