Paid Business Listings
Business Listings on the internet are generally available in the form of yellow-page listings in business directories, typically of a local nature or website listings in old and trusted directories, typically of a global nature. More often than not, these are searchable repositories aiding local business lookup or a global vendor search. Getting listed on these destinations is a targeted form of marketing which also provides valuable link equity.
Besides the obvious advantage of link value being passed on, these listings are actively targeted due to the following considerations:
Secondary Marketing Channel:As many of these listing services or directories have a local focus, they typically are recognized entities in their respective geographies commanding substantial prospective traffic.
Prominent placement: - Being paid, clients can usually choose the location of their listing and get their businesses highlighted.
Business Profile Showcase: Some of these destinations also allow addition of profile information, which can be effectively leveraged as advertising content. Such profile showcase improves the quality of listing by providing important information about a business which a prospect may be interested in looking for before approaching the company.
Pitfalls
As a paid directory is a lucrative business, numerous such listing websites have cropped up from nowhere. Many of them employ techniques which are aimed at artificial bloating of PageRanks (of important pages such as homepage and top-level category pages). Search engines such as Google, have severely condemned such blatant selling of their proprietary technology and have come down heavily on such websites by nullifying their PageRanks and in some cases even removing them completely from the index. Thus, it has become extremely important to lay down a stringent selection criteria while choosing these paid directories or business listing websites.
Pointers for selection
A good paid directory of business listings will be characterized by:
Marketing Opportunity: To showcase important information about business’ products and/or services.
Search Engine Recognition: Search engines value age as an important criterion during evaluation of a website. A listing site with reputation will have search engine recognition what with almost all of its pages indexed along with grading provided through PageRank.
Categorization: Proper categorization brings in a hierarchical arrangement which is important to reduce link transitions from the homepage to a particular listing. A thorough thought after categorization helps classify a particular website according to its theme and industry.
We expend numerous hours searching for legitimate, value adding business listing destinations based on various selection criteria we have devised over time. As the search engines’ evaluation of these destinations changes swiftly, we have to keep upbreast with the developments in their link evaluation criteria. Consequently, we have to keep investing a lot of efforts finding new destinations which closely reflect the selection criteria.
Contact Us or send an email to info@linkcredible.com for more information and to discuss your requirements.
