I am a volunteer DMOZ editor and I struggle to find good sites to list - I have no backlog perse. My current list of un-reviewed sites contain poor quality, spam submissions or sites that are hard to find a home for.

The DMOZ/ODP is all about quality sites, so if you have a quality site (is yours really quality?), with an office location (physical address), contact details (phone, address) and you are not trying to fool or spam the directory then you will get listed.

By quality I mean, we are human, we look at your site - is it good quality? - take a step back and have an honest appraisal. Don’t spam us with sub page links or other junk.

Very little gets past a keen editor - they will look at your site, review, browse and inspect. Is your site ready to be inspected and scrutinized by a human?

Don’t submit incomplete sites, or sites with broken links or (my pet hate) sites that are part of an affiliate network - we check thoroughly and your other duplicate sites will be found.

Of the 250 sites I have reviewed to date, I have not found one that I didn’t have to manually change or edit. If you make our lives easier and implement what you find in the DMOX guidelines, then you stand a better chance of being listed quickly.

The first and most important thing to remember about your submission to DMOZ is that human editors review your submission, your site and all submitted details before it is ever published in DMOZ. So your submission needs to be very good, 100% clean, no spam, no keyword stuffing. This is your company listing, not an SEO link farm! - submissions like this simply won’t be tolerated.

My suggestions:-
1. Read the submission guidelines at DMOZ and understand them.
2. Find the MOST relevant category you fit in at present. Are the sites in your chosen category really your competition? - legitimately? - be honest with yourself. It is important to find the MOST relevant current category for your site. Do NOT submit to a category where you would like to be, submit to where you belong! If you are a one-man outfit it doesn’t matter, but don’t make yourself out to be World Wide, or nation-wide just because you would like to be - you are most likely not going to be the best fit here, and the top level categories get clogged up with spam - your site will either get lost in the wrong category or stay in un-reviewed until a home can be found. Submit to your town/suburb if that’s the best fit. If you have one office then your site belongs in that regional area, if you don’t have an office then you are going to struggle getting properly listed so try to list an address on your website, with your business name, ABN and contact details - sometimes DMOZ editors call to confirm details!

3. Do NOT use an SEO/Spam title - we simply end up removing your keyword spam anyway. Use your official company name (as listed in an equivalent of ABN lookup in Australia). Spam keyword titles and descriptions are read, will be noticed by human editors.

4. Write a clear professional description of your site and your services. Remove all marketing jargon, any superfluous words like “best”, “biggest”, “cheap”, etc from your description. Do not repeat your title in the description. Do not spam with keywords - try not using them for once! Remove repetitive words and any abbreviations (unless commonly understood). Read what is currently published in the category.

5. DMOZ is edited by volunteers - who spend their time editing spam mostly. Like anything in life if you make someones life easier, you are more likely to get what you want. Make our lives easier .. please!

Also .. DMOZ 2.0 .. for those that haven’t heard, Dmoz 2.0 is being worked on currently and is due for release in Q1 2010, end of March ish ..