Automated search engine crawlers are all the rage these days.  An entire industry has sprung up around them.  Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of companies from all over the world specialize in making your website look nice for crawlers.  Future fortunes can be lost or made depending on how search engines see your website, so SEO isn't to be taken lightly.

That being said, at least one group of people out there still think people do it better.  That group is the editorial staff at The Open Directory.

The Open Directory, or Dmoz, is a human-edited, human-created directory of web content.  Unlike crawlers and spiders that methodically filter out across the web to index sites, directories, like The Open Directory, are created by hand… one site at a time.

Dmoz is by far the largest and most comprehensive of these directories (over 4 million sites included).  With tens of thousands of volunteer editors, Dmoz operates under a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, each with a group of editors.  Users submit sites to the directory and Dmoz editors, after reviewing the site, add it to the category they think it best fits into.

Take a look at our Search Engine Summary.  You won't see Dmoz on it.  That's because Dmoz is 1) not a search engine - but most importantly- 2) isn't accessed directly by the vast majority of internet users.  However, Dmoz makes the data in its directory available for download by anyone who wants it.  Many search engines, including Google and AOL, use these Dmoz data files to supplement their own databases.  In fact, the list of sites using Dmoz data has grown so large that it has it's own category within the directory.

If you're a website owner or webmaster and your site isn't listed in Dmoz, I'd take a moment right now to submit it for inclusion.  While your website won't show up at the top of a Google search result page just because you added it to Dmoz, it will 1) make Google's crawler aware of you and 2) Get you a trusted link.

And don't rule out direct traffic from dmoz.org.