How to Submit a Site

To be able to submit your noncommercial site to Zeal you will have to first pass a member quiz. Before attempting this you should read and study the Zeal guidelines at http://zeal.com/guidelines/user/ To begin the process you should click on the join now button on the zeal home page at www.zeal.com After signing up you will have to pass a member quiz in order to be able to submit your site. You will have to get 90 percent of the questions correct to pass the quiz so that you can be able to submit a site for consideration. This might sound hard but people used to have to average 90 percent correct overall, which meant if you did poorly on the test and failed 10 times in a row you would have to average far above 90 percent on your tests in the future many times to raise your overall average to 90 percent correct. This took hours and hours, now the process is a lot easier as you only have to get 90 percent right once no matter how many times you take the quiz.

Zeal follows several basic common sense rules for editing including commercial sites are not allowed, descriptions must be appropriate and as detailed as possible. Sites also must be organized into categories which follow the general structure that Zeal uses meaning that you must have three or more sites in a category and three or more subcategories under a primary category. Also you must use the same general terminology for categories that Zeal in general does. The Zeal quiz is very tricky when it comes to titling as Zeal likes titles to follow a certain format such as Title - Domain.com and not the other way around. Zeal likes using action words like find, examine, and analyze for example in descriptions. The quiz reflects this. The quiz is very tricky on titling issues that are very technical. By studying the guidlines and writing down the questions you get wrong the quiz will be easier to do well on as you do it more than once if you have to which you probably will. The questions will be different each time you take the quiz. After you pass the member quiz you will then be able to submit your site to Zeal. You can submit your site right then.

Your site submission should be as keyword rich as possible allowing for an intelligent description of your site. Your submission will rank on MSN search according to the keywords in the title and description. Nothing else really matters. But since MSN search does not rank by any real pattern according to quality apart from the chosen editor and sponsor choices at the top you should opt to try to win the keyword phrases that deliver fewer than 15 results on MSN search. That is because these phrases should be easily winnable for you and you can be among the first page of results on MSN. Zeal encourages the use of keywords more so than ODP or Yahoo so don't be afraid to put some into your descriptions. To determine popular keywords use the pay per click search engine Overture's suggestion tool which reports how many times phrases were searched for on overture and the partner sites that use them like MSN and Yahoo. Zeal has a hard limit on title length and description length and you will not be able to go beyond this so there is no reason why you should not use as many relevant words and characters as possible to describe your site or any site.

Zeal gives people editing privaleges according to how many points they have. For passing the member quiz you are given 25 points for example. If you have passed the member quiz you can submit sites to any categories you want even sites that are not yours. For each succesful submission that is added you will earn 5 points. To be able to adopt a category so that you can add sites on your own without having to wait for someone else to review your submissions you will need a minimum of 75 points and you will have to pass another quiz. So after adding 10 sites and passing both quizes you will be able to adopt your own category and add sites as you wish or even further divide the category into subcategories as you wish within guidelines of course. Being in charge of a category or a series of categories can allow you to tailer the directory structure to the content your site has. Rather than having to work within the categories that exist or try to talk someone else into making a subcategory you can create them yourself as you get higher up in Zeal points. If you have a large site featuring lots of diverse content this can be a very valuable thing to be able to do and may be worth the hours you will have to put into Zeal to build up the points to make this possible.