Submitting new sites to web directories + essential mtags

[patent10021]

Was suggested to submit a new site to Yahoo and Dmoz. Do webmasters/SEO people still do this?

What directories do you recommend? Is it ok to submit if the site isn't done yet? Are there any meta tags or such that you think are essential and must be on the home page at the very minimal?

[SrWebDeveloper]

Originally Posted by patent10021

Was suggested to submit a new site to Yahoo and Dmoz. Do webmasters/SEO people still do this?

What directories do you recommend? Is it ok to submit if the site isn't done yet? Are there any meta tags or such that you think are essential and must be on the home page at the very minimal?

Once your site is optimized for SEO (before going live, not after as indexing happens quickly with most crawlers since new sites have new/modified DNS entries which often trigger the whole process) you can speed up indexing to be almost instant across many services at once via http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/submit/ (Easy Submit) which is the best free service out there.

But the key is SEO tag optimization, which means whatever directories you feel relevant to include in indexing are controlled by creating a valid robots.txt stored in your document root. This means do not include script directories, config folders, stuff you don't want to be indexed which might be security related or simply privacy related.

Information on setting up a valid robots.txt and its importance:
http://www.robotstxt.org/

In terms of tags and other SEO best practice HTML:

doctype
title
description
keywords
content type/character set
link all external files properly (CSS/JS)
robots meta tag (related to above, if you can't access document root)

But its worth noting much of the above is usually maintained through plugins and extensions to almost all popular CMS's out there so it's a simple matter of installing it and maybe configuring page title/description/keywords when entering content. Many modules these days transparently add RDF to the HTML (attributes added to HTML tags which define characteristics of the content so both humans and machines can understand and index) as part of semantic web support. Look into that for your CMS. If you are writing the HTML by hand, simply follow advice above instead.