newbie site owner with questions about search results

[sarumu1]

Hi.

I've created a purely informational website that contains good (if not better) content for my target audience when compared to my peers.

my site (http://www.breastconsult.com)

I submitted my site to the zeal directory, dmoz.org, google, yahoo-web-search and the yahoo directory.

It was listed in the zeal directory a few days ago and the yahoo directory yesterday (yes, I paid the fee).

I have yet to hear from the open directory project.

My problems/ questions:

1. It does not (I can't seem to find it) come up when I do searches using the exact URL in the yahoo directory.

2. It does show up when I search the exact URL in google or yahoo's search - though it does not offer "similar sites" when I click that option in the google results.

3. It does not come up (as far as I can tell) when I do searches of either pair of key words (breast implants, breast augmentation) on yahoo's web search, yahoo's directory, or google's search.

How long should I wait to expect it to show up anywhere on one of these engines/ directories on searches for keywords before I even consider optimization strategies? It seems intuitive that I should know where I stand before examining other options to improve my standing - I just want to know how long I have to wait.

Thanks for any comments, Subbu.

[rustybrick]

How new is the site?

[sarumu1]

The site is about three weeks old, i submitted it to google, yahoo-search and odp about two weeks ago.

Subbu.

[Marcia]

Welcome to the forums, sarumu1.

I submitted my site to the zeal directory, dmoz.org, google, yahoo-web-search and the yahoo directory.
I see that you submitted the site to Zeal yourself, and that there are both paid and unpaid listings in the category - which I assume are Zeal for information only and LookSmart for commercial sites.

Regarding the competitor's site - I didn't check out the ones listed in Zeal, but with those types of sites, they are not necessarily an information only site, some could be considered a commercial site.

Sites take a little bit of time to appear for search at Yahoo when they're added, but not too much time.

How yours will fare at ODP can depend on which editor looks at it for review and which category you submitted it to at DMOZ. One issue is that it isn't a "complete" site in that the patient profiles are "coming soon." No doubt an editor may wonder if those profiles will be of patients of the doctors involved with the site, and have a decision to make whether it is for information only, or whether it's commercial in nature. It could go either way once the site is finished and the profiles are up, and determine whether it belongs in a commercial or information category. They seem to be very fussy about those things.

Meantime, submissions at ODP can be almost instantaneous or can take up to a couple of years, so the best thing is to submit and move on to other things for promoting the site and encouraging traffic. If you're not listed in about 6 months, you can ask about the site at Resource Zone, a site maintained by ODP Meta Editors as a service to the internet community.

For Yahoo! Search and Google, those are crawling engines, and inclusion and ranking with those will depend on inbound links and on-site optimization.