Website Marketing
These days many people search for local businesses on the Internet. To make sure they find you include on every page of your website the street address, zip code, phone number, and the five or 10 other local community place names your business serves. If you can, include place names in the title tag, too. When you seek links to your site (see below), a local business should get links from local businesses with place names in the communities you serve and complementary businesses in your industry nationwide.
Links to your web site from other sites bring additional traffic, but since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website (”link popularity”) as an important factor in ranking, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines, too. Google has introduced a 10-point scale called PageRank (10 is the highest rank) to indicate the quantity and quality of incoming links, all links, however, are not created equal. Links from popular information hubs will help your site rank higher than those from low traffic sites.
Since a link from a directory will help your ranking, get you traffic, be sure to list your site in the free open project directory DMOZ, overseen by overworked volunteer human editors. Ttis hierarchical directory provides content feeds to all the major search engines. Plus it provides a link to your site from an information hub that Google deems important, but don’t be impatient and resubmit or you’ll go to the end of the queue.
Yahoo! Directory is another important directory to be listed in, though their search results recently haven’t been featuring their own directory as prominently, real humans will read (and too often, pare down) your 200-character sentence, so be very careful and use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don’t have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping.
Business sites require a $299 annual recurring fee for Yahoo! Express to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days, other directories to consider might be About.com and Business.com.
You may also find some directories focused on particular industries, such as education or finance. You probably belong to various trade associations that feature member sites. Ask for a link. Even if you have to pay something for a link, it may help boost your PageRank. Beware of directories that solicit you for “upgraded listings.” Unless a directory is widely used in your field, your premium ad won’t help — but the link itself will help boost your PageRank and hence your search engine ranking. Marginal directories come and go very quickly, making it hard to keep up. Don’t try to be exhaustive here.