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How to find the right category? I type the appropriate keywords (e.g. keyword keyword in uk) into dmoz and take the most likely cat from the list. Is there a better or more appropriate way?
If it is a commercial site must it always include 'Business and Economy' in the cat?
Waiting - How long is long enough?
I read all kinds of joys, desperation and whines at WebmasterWorld e.g. 'My site got into ODP in 24 hours' to 'I've been waiting 7 months...'. I know its a volunteer thing and there is a long line of sites waiting for review. Can anyone say what a typical waiting time would be? When would you contact an Editor?
The only thing that counts here is that someone competent actually reads the mail arriving at the address given, for the very rare incident where an editor wants to contact the site maintainer. In 99.9% of the cases, the address is really irrelevant, and it's not required anyway.
Categories
With commercial sites, one of the easiest methods is to look where your competition is listed. In most cases this will be the category your own site belongs to as well. If the site doesn't have any competition, then your method searching for keywords is a good start. Please make sure to read the category description after you have found a first target, as it may give you further pointers, often indicating possible alternatives.
Business and Economy
That's actually a category name over at Yahoo... ;)
The relevant ODP branch is named just "Business", but of course serves the same purpose. If the business is active internationally (or all across the US), then this is indeed the most likely area for a listing.
If the business is of a regional nature, then it will rather be listed (only) in the category for its physical location in the Regional branch. National (US) or international businesses get a secondary listing for the location of their headquarters.
If the business sells products that are only interesting to a very narrow and specialized audience, then in some cases it will rather be listed in the relevant topical branch (eg. Science for research equipment). This is the case most often for software manufacturers (but not normally their resellers), which will go to Computers/Software/*.
Waiting
There's no good answer to that without knowing the specific category in question. And even then, the waiting time can be completely random. As you already figured out, that's one of the few disadvantages of a volunteer system.
contact an Editor
In most cases, there's not much of a point to do that. If the editor had had the time to look at your submission, then it probably would be listed already. On the other hand, if you suspect that there might have been a misunderstanding about the nature of the site, then I'd suggest contacting an editor about a month after submitting (and to escalate to higher level editors in two-week increments from there on).
So if the e-mail contact can't answer questions like these, I would hope that s/he is at least able to refer them to someone who could.
Categories
The most common way is to search the directory for your keywords, or you can search on the domains of direct competitors who may already be listed. Typically, there is only one best subject category; very often there is also one best Regional/ category; as the directory's structure has become quite complex, multiple topical listings are rare.
Some branches, such as Web Designers [dmoz.org], political campaigns [dmoz.org], or U.S. colleges and universities [dmoz.org], have very specific rules about placement and categorization. They may refer to outside references (especially relating to health and scientific or scholarly subjects, or established industries). It may pay to review not only the submission guidelines for the category that interests you, but the submission guidelines going up the branch-- the ODP software is unfortunately not very good about cascading those charters down to lower levels.
The Business_and_Economy subcategory within the Regional/ hierarchy does not necessarily contain all business or commercial sites. For example, travel agents are placed in Travel_and_Tourism, theatres in Arts_and_Entertainment, newspapers in News_and_Media, and dentists under Health/ . But if you are submitting a commercial site to Regional/ which does not so obviously fall under one of the other topical headings, Business_and_Economy is a safe bet.
Waiting
Unfortunately, there is no measure of directory-wide waiting time because there is no directory-wide pattern of editing. For instance, a higher-level editor may go into one abandoned category and clear out all 100 submissions-- some of which may be 6 months old, others 6 minutes old. An editor with a different philosophy might go into 10 categories and process only the 10 oldest, or the 10 easiest, submissions. And because editors in high volume categories can easily burn out, they are encouraged to tackle different projects and edit in different areas. We do try internally to give high quality and productive editors access to larger areas of the directory, but it takes a long time to inculcate all the nuances of editing to someone who has just joined.
As for contacting an editor, some have quoted a flat 3 months, but I'd advise everyone to apply some common sense. Take stock of the category. If there's no editor listed in a category, or three of its parents, and the last-updated date is 8 months ago, I'd go ahead an e-mail the nearest editor after two or three weeks asking him/her to come by that neglected branch. If it's a category like Computers/Hardware/Retailers, where the subcats are updated every day but certain to be crushed under thousands of new arrivals, pestering listed editors is not going to speed your submission in the slightest.
