SEO Moves Blog - Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing Tips and Resources » Business Tactics

3 Great Local Business Directories

Phil — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:57:39 +0000

Maybe you think that having your business on the web (solely or mostly) transcends the local business world, but that’s not the case at all. Even if you’re online only, there’s no reason not to list your business on local business listings. You never know who could be wanting your exact service – they might be only a few blocks away. It’s easy and free to sign up with most local business listings and it doesn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes. Three you should consider signing up for are Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.

Yelp has not only listings for local businesses but also reviews. You may have to prime the pump a little at first by getting a friend or two to write positive reviews of your business, and you will have much more credibility if you also rate local businesses. But as the positive reviews add up, your business’s local profile can be raised significantly.

With Yahoo! Local, you have to be a local business, and there are both basic and enhanced listings. The enhanced listings cost $9.95 per month and get you a much more detailed listing.

Signing up for Bing Local is easy and quick, and Bing’s local search refinements are known to be good, so you definitely don’t want to miss out on signing up on Bing Local.

Considering how easy and quick it is to become part of these local business directories, there’s no reason for you not to sign up.

Using Article Directories For Website Marketing

Phil — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:09:01 +0000

Will your efforts at writing and submitting articles about your website’s line of expertise to article directories be rewarded? In general, yes, but there are a few Dos and Don’ts to keep in mind:

Do concentrate your efforts on the top article directories, which are currently Ezinearticles, GoArticles, and eHow
Do write coherent, readable, high quality articles that actually tell the reader something they don’t know
Do follow the site’s editorial guidelines. Some are more stringent than others, but whatever they are, follow them
Do link to your articles from your Facebook account
Do post a Tweet with a link when you have a new article published
Don’t send the same article out to a bunch of article directories. Duplicate content isn’t your friend when it comes to SERP results
Don’t bother with sites that say they’ll submit your article to “hundreds” of articles directories. You won’t get much, if anything, from the effort.

A stable of good, original articles on top article sites can actually bring you more site traffic than if you had those articles on your own website (at least at first). For budget conscious webmasters, articles on articles directories are a form of free advertising. The “bio” and “resource” boxes article sites provide usually allow links to your website. Take advantage of any legitimate opportunities an articles site offers to link to your website.

Learning from your Competitors

Phil — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:44:50 +0000

There are several levels of research on your competitors that you can do effectively on your own. The first level of research is simply getting a pen and some paper and “crawling” the site yourself while making notes on structure, anchor text, and navigation. This is a way to get fresh ideas about your own site’s navigation, anchor text, and structure.
If you want to dig a little deeper, look at the html source for a competitor’s page. Usually ctrl+u will get you this information, or it will be under the “Tools” menu. Look for well-made title tags, H1, H2, and H3 headers, and a regular smattering of nofollow tags. These are signs that they know their SEO.

You can download a free back link analyzer like the one from SEObook. Using this, you can analyze, say, the top hundred back links by PageRank and Alexa Rank. All you have to do is load them into a spreadsheet and order them that way. This lets you see where their best links are from. If there are bunches of back links from one domain, the competitor probably owns that domain. Figure out where your best bets are for finding your own back links, and start asking. You’ll probably get at least a few good back links this way.