Hunting for online directories - the in depth strategy

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Directory marketing can help boost your companies performance a great deal. Not only will you get qualified leads for your business, your web site will also increase it's traffic ranking a tremendous amount.

Here are a couple basic advantages to online directories,

- Substantial staying power
- Repetitive marketing
- Your listing grows with the entire site
- No updating unless necessary
- Not necessary to link back to the directory

Please Note: This article is meant to discuss and implement marketing strategies for local business directories online, not link exchange, a. k.a swapping links with other websites.

For many people, one/two directories always come to mind,

- dir. yahoo. com
- dmoz. com
- directory. google. com

With web marketing, you want to have ever lasting staying power, online directories can provide you with this and more.

Many people who DO NOT use the internet everyday stick with the basics when they come online. Many people are usually looking for a specific service or product that they want to check up on within their local community. This is why it is so crucial that you get noticed locally online.

Every major city has at least one or two good business directories for you to submit your business to. Many of these directories don't even require that you have a website.

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Tips on how to find local directories online:

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Try being very specific when you search. There are two methods that work really good.

A) "Hamilton" Business Directory < Search for "Your City" plus "business directory". This should typically bring you to local business directories that usually are competing against one another. Don't be afraid to keep digging through this important search term.

B) Be VERY specific:
If in the case that you can't find anything, try searching for something general within your local area. For instance, if you "cut hair", try searching for "Hair Salons In (your area)".

Ex. "Hair Salons in hamilton, Ontario".

Doing a specific search like this should typically bring up local directories that are really trying to get the most exposure as possible. The reason why you should find a directory this way is because if you don't find anything by doing specific searches for specific products or services locally, you might as well reap the rewards of having your own local business directory and get all the advertising exposure that comes with it.

Directories online are there for one thing and one thing only. To give the owner of the directory massive exposure while helping his/her local, regionally, national community. That's it.

There are few people out there that just create a local directory just for something to do. These people typically have too much time on their hands and they probably take great pride in their directory online.

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How To Prepare For Directory Submissions

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There are certain key bullets of information that 90% of directories ask for, here they are in no particular order.

Name
Company
Position
Type Of Business
Phone Number
Fax Number

Email: - (may need to be validated)

Web Site
Title Of Your Site: - (keep it within 70 char)
Description: - (keep it within 200 char)

Search Terms:
If you are asked for search terms, don't disregard them. This is just there so that the directory you are submitting to can add these search terms to their "search engine" in order to find your business.

So if a directory asks you for search terms, add in as many as you can that you would want people to find your business by.

and... Category

That's typically about all that most directories will ask for. Very straight forward. I would recommend opening up "Note Pad" or "Word Document" and fill in these requirements on your own before you start submitting your company. It may save you a lot of time in the end.

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Targeting Regional & International:

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If your business is better off targeting people outside your local community, you might want to consider implementing a link exchange program. This is where you will find extremely competitive directories online that want to get as much exposure as you do.

Once you start targeting internationally, many of the directories you will find will most likely want to swap information with you. The good ol' barter system, an eye for an eye. Nothing wrong with this. Just make sure that the directory you link to doesn't "feel wrong".

... and I mean "feel wrong".

Someone came to me the other day and asked me to take a look at something. They said that they weren't sure if they should swap links with this other company. I simply asked them, what kind of feeling do you get from this other company?

This person said that the website was a little fishy and felt a little cold. What is the best course of action here???

Go with your gut instinct. You never want to link to websites that you don't even feel right about it. Besides, if you link to it from your site, you might as well put up a banner sign outside your window saying that you fully support this other company.

If an online directory asks you to exchange information and you don't feel that it would be valuable to your visitors, move onto another directory. If you feel fishy about it, so will others.

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Finding International Directories:

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For this you'll want to implement the same strategy as before when you learned about searching for "local directories". Try using the "country, state/provice" added with online directory or business directory.

So do a search like this:
Canadian Business Directory - or - Online Directories In Canada

This style of searching should bring you specific directories. Please remember that there is NO quick way of doing this. You must have patience since, even now, there are still literally 1000's of directories I've never heard of.

Directories keep popping up every day. Don't be afraid to search for new directories once a month, or once every 90 days.

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Placing Your Companies Directory Listing In The Right Spot:

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This step could be one of the most important steps you take for advertising within online directories.

I say this is important because without careful positioning, your directory listing may never see a visitor again.

Steps you can take to get proper placements:

- Do a "general search":
Search within the directory for something general and related to your business. Place your company within that search result.

- Only 2 clicks away:
Try placing your company within a category that is only 2 clicks away from the main directory page. This will increase your results. Some directories can't offer you this, it's ok depending on the popularity of the directory you are submitting to.

- Watch out for spammers:
Watch out for directories that list 100 companies on one page. This is called "Link Farms" online and is frowned upon from search engines.

- Find empty categories:
Don't be afraid to click in once more in order to find a category that has been barely touched. Getting your own category is the ultimate listing for your business.

- Don't go "unrelated":
Do not submit your company to "unrelated" categories. If you can't find a category for your business, try contacting the directory administrator to implement a new category for your business.

- Was it too confusing?
Again, go with your gut feeling. If you found the directory way too confusing to find anything, 9/10 times other visitors will also find it confusing and leave.

That about wraps it up for online directories. There is enough knowledge here to help you find the right directories for your business. Some tips have been excluded because every person adapts to their own strategy and I hope you will too.

Best Of Luck To Ya!

The importance of obtaining backward links

I am sure that most people who have a website are looking into ways to help them to attract more people to read their site. There are many differing opinions on the best way to go about doing this but one thing that most people agree on is that it is essential to build up the number of backward links that point to your site. The question is how do we obtain these links?

It is always best to try to get other websites from the same industry as your own to add a link to your site on their site (on the homepage if possible). This is not as easy as it might seem as most of these people will be reluctant to do so. I have, in the past, spent hours phoning and e-mailing the webmasters from different sites which are in a similar field to my own site. Even when only one person agreed to my request after phoning up thirty people, I was happy. Hopefully this link will be permanent and over time could prove very valuable to me.

People who visit this persons site are now potential visitors to my own site as they may see my link and of course hopefully will click on it. In general the more links I am able to obtain the better, and in time I may well see an increase in my websites page rank. This in turn should move me up a few places in the search engines for my keywords, which of course should then result in more traffic.

This is the value of any backward link. If the page where my link has been added is a high traffic page or has a high page rank value then I am even more fortunate. As an example the link would be of far greater value to my site if it was placed on a page with a page rank five rather than a page with a page rank two.

How many backward links should I be aiming to obtain?

In my humble opinion you have to be careful not to build up the number of these backward links too quickly. It should be an ongoing project throughout the life of the website. If as an example you are able to obtain ten every week for five years, this would be superb. Where it can go wrong is if you obtain:

ten in week one

none in weeks two, three and four

three hundred in week five

none in weeks six, seven and eight

two hundred in week nine

This is very irregular and weeks five and nine suggests you have purchased a whole bundle of links. This could quite easily raise a red flag with the search engines.

There is no quick fix, hard work pays off and we all need to have patience. I always look to the long term and believe in time the work I put in today will be of great benefit to me tomorrow.

Other ways of obtaining links is by:

Writing articles

Purchasing a text link ad

Out of these two options I prefer the writing articles option. It can be quite boring to write these articles in some peoples opinion and in a way I agree. As I have already stated however, hard work pays off and this is a simple way of gaining one-way backward links. I try to ensure that each article that I write is informative and offers the reader some hopefully good advice. On average I probably write seven articles per week promoting different websites.