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Unfortunately,
free way has its problems. If your site doesn't get enough clicks, it will get buried under enormous heap of regular directory & LiveDirectory results and you'll never get someone to review your site, not to mention getting any traffic. To avoid these problems, you're going to have to achieve two things.
The most important thing is to select keywords you can obtain a decent rank under. There's no sense in trying to go for most popular keywords that already produce hundreds of matches within main directory. As I said before, LiveDirectory listings only come up if no matches are found in main directory, all matches that have been found are exhausted or if user specifically requests to see LiveDirectory results. If you target too popular keywords, you'll be buried under results from main directory and will not attract too many clicks. I recommend that you try to find keywords that are relevant and used fairly often, but don't result in many main directory sites turning up.
After finding right keywords, you'll have to get your site close to top of LiveDirectory results from beginning. As NBCi LiveDirectory does not spider, you'll have to make sure that description and title you enter contain a nice amount of keywords. I recommend placing keyword you feel is most important in your title once or twice, and 2-4 times in your description. You should also attempt to squeeze a few of your less important keywords into your description, and if possible, one or two in your title wouldn't hurt either. By making sure that your title and description contain several instances of your most important keyword, you're increasing your chances of getting a high LiveDirectory ranking from get-go.
OK, you just read above and are thinking "Boy, I'm gonna make my NBCi title and description look like a META keywords tag and grab 'em top rankings easily!".. I'm sorry to say, but that alone won't cut it. As I have described above, user clickthroughs determine whether your site will get into main directory or not. Do you think that an unattractive list of keywords as your description and title will get you many clicks? Didn't think so.
As you're going to need to attract people to click on your site when it shows up in results, you're going to want to make a compromise between a keyword-stuffed description and a description that attracts people to click. As clicks count towards getting your site to main directory and also boost your ranking in LiveDirectory, you should focus on getting clicks. If you can add a heavy amount of keywords to your title and description without sacrificing too much of its attractiveness, then do it. But always remember to think 'Would I click, if I was searching and this result came up?'.
With these words, I hope that you now have some insight on how NBCi system works (some of more experienced might have noticed that system is actually pretty similar to Direct Hit's) and are able to get from LiveDirectory to regular directory.
Lauri Harpf runs the A Promotion Guide website, where he offers free information about search engines, directories and other promotion methods. His site can be found at http://www.apromotionguide.com/
