Changing Hosts... We are moving to a good hosting company in a hurry so some pages are missing or not working correctly, hopefully things will be back to normal soon.
Thanks for your patience.

Targeting Internet Yellow Pages

Optimize Your Online Local Presence

Part 2

By Esoos Bobnar www.searchenginehelp.com

Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | April 2005

Originally Published: April 2005

Continued From: <<< Local Search Listings Explained

Targeting Internet Yellow Pages

You can improve your chances of getting listed with the major local search engines by making sure your site is listed in the top Internet Yellow Pages.

The table on the right provides a list of top Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) in roughly their order of importance. Most of these IYPs provide a free business submission process. In addition to getting listed, it's also important that your business information remains consistent throughout all of the IYP sites. Information consistency across IYP sites is crucial to the process of getting your business listed quickly and accurately in the major local search engines.

Deciding which IYP's (Internet Yellow Pages) service to list your business with is a three step process:

1. First, do a search for the keywords/keyphrases your business is targeting. Ask yourself; Do any of these Internet Yellow Pages come up in the main (not local) search results? If so, then listing your site with them will help get your business indexed on a site that is already doing well in the organic (i.e. non-paid) search results. In essence, you are piggy-backing off a site which already doing well in order to achieve top rankings.
   
   
2. Second, determine how many other businesses are already advertising in your target category on that IYP's service. If there's just a few, then you can probably get a prominent listing without having to compete very hard for attention. However, if there are already so many advertisers that your business won't show up until the second or third page, then the effectiveness of your listing is greatly diminished. You might want to look elsewhere.
   
   
3. Finally, determine which of the IYPs is likely to be the dominant provider in your region. Users in your area will tend to focus on the IYPs that cater to their part of the country. You can usually tell who targets your region by finding out who produces your local phone book – that's probably the dominant phone company in your area. For instance, RealPages.com is put out by BellSouth, while SuperPages.com is put out by Verizon. Determine which phone company has a lot of users in your area, then find which IYP site(s) they own.

Yahoo Yellow Pages, AOL Yellow Pages, MSN Yellow Pages, SwitchBoard.com, and YellowPages.com are all used nationally, so you can submit to these sites without worrying too much about regional targeting. SuperPages.com has also become much more of a national Internet Yellow Pages.

A good place to start is by filling out the free business profile at SuperPages.com. Follow that up by placing a paid listing with YellowPages.com and with Yahoo Local (if your business is located in the South Western US, you might consider the bundled paid listing with SmartPages.com and Yahoo Yellow Pages). Then pursue listings with two or three other IYPs chosen according to the three criteria mentioned above.

Since nearly all local search engines take their results from Internet Yellow Pages, these steps will greatly improve your chances of getting listed with and ranking well in all of the major local search engines. From there it's just a matter of keeping your listing accurate and up-to-date with these IYPs. Doing so will help to ensure that the major local search players have your latest info, and that there's no conflict between the information they're pulling from the various IYPs.

Don't worry about purchasing an expensive listing in the IYPs. Just buy the cheapest one available, such as YellowPages.com's Basic Business Card (currently $12 per month). This will be enough to make sure your site is picked up and ranked well by all the major local search engines.

Of course, the more expensive listings won't hurt your site, and they do allow you more control over the way your business appears on that IYP site. If your marketing budget is fat, then you might consider purchasing a more full-featured listing. Just remember that the pricier listings are really not a critical part of a local search optimization strategy. To start with, just be sure you at least have the basic listing.

Continued: Engine-Specific Optimization Info for Local Search >>>

Continued From: <<< Local Search Listings Explained

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition.
FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings.

Site Promotion Articles Indexes:

Search Engine Promotion Help Site Map

©2008 Search Engine Promotion Help
July 24 2008 03:28 UTC