The Importance of Local Business Directory Listings

 Experienced search engine optimization (SEO) experts know the importance of local business directory listings for small and medium-sized business that have a regional focus.

Listing your business will often bring increased targeted traffic to your website and help in the overall search engine ranking of your site. The top search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing often rank a website on link popularity (inbound links, called backlinks), along with other factors.

Types Of Directories Available

Twenty years ago business owners had only a few choices for listing their business in directories. Three options previously available included:

o Yellow Books
o General Business/Regional Directories
o Specific Industry Directories

The first option, the yellow pages, was major source of advertising for most small businesses. You had to have a business phone line to advertise. Since the internet took over, the yellow pages has been providing diminishing returns for most business owners. The advertising is expensive, fewer people search the yellow pages, and the advertising rates go up every year.

The second option, general business or regional directories, such as D&B, Hoovers, or the local Chamber of Commerce provided valuable services for individuals seeking new suppliers.

The third option, specific industry directories, was often published through an industry association. You had to qualify for membership to be listed.

Today, all three types of directories are now available on the web. In fact a Google search for "local business directory" returns over 181,000,000 results. Even an exact match (in quotation marks) delivers an astounding 12,700,000 listings. Talk about information overload!

Local business directories may charge a fee, be free with a reciprocal link, or totally free without restrictions. Directories that charge a fee cost anywhere from $4.95 to $299 a year. The vast majority of paid listings are not worth paying for, because it's easy to get free links without restrictions.

One way to identify local business directories is to type in "directory" and "your city", and submit links to those directories that come up on the first three or four pages of the search engine. Do this with all three big search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing.


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