Those of you who know about SEO know that one of the easy ways to promote your site and show to search engine that your site exists is to submit your site to directories.

I submit my sites to a few directories every once in a while and I used to use directorycritic.com’s free list of directories.

Lately, there are so many junk directories listed that you can not believe, they are death, paid or their submit form doesn’t work.

I don’t know why this happened but I’m guessing that the owner paid someone to take care of his site for him and that someone is either dishonest or very lazy to the point that the list is almost not usable and a waste of time.

If you know about directories, you know that 90% of them are lame to begin with, the owners setup those directories with free scripts, templates and no technical knowledge.

Here are some of the stupid things about many of these directories:
1 - They have funny and irrelevant domain names.
2 - They have funny and irrelevant names.
3 - Their submit forms don’t work.
4 - Their submit form does work but it doesn’t tell you that if your submission was successful.
5 - Their Captcha image doesn’t work.
6 - They use bad English. (worst than mine :))
7 - They never approve any link, some of them have 1,000s of links waiting for review.

You may have noticed that in search result pages (SERPs) of Google, there is a two line description:

Google uses (most of the time) your meta description (if it thinks it’s more relevant) and if your description is too long, it will cut it and show 3 dots at the end:

If you don’t want this ti happen, write a good description that is only 155 characters long, for example, in this case the description fits perfectly:

So when writing a meta description remember: (in no particular order)

1 - Write a meta description that is 155 characters long. (or less, obviously)
2 - Write a meta description that is descriptive.
3 - Write a meta description that is provocative.
4 - Use your primary keyword(s) in it, don’t write a stream of keywords, write something meaningful.

One of my clients was buying Stumble traffic and as soon as he stopped doing it, Alexa rank for his site dropped by 1000s.
We think this is because users with Stumble toolbar tend to have Alexa toolbar too. (and probably other toolbars)