Free Local Business Directory Listings - The Start of Any
Effective Search Engine Marketing Program

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Free local business directory listings should be the first thing you do when you start promoting your business website online. While some might consider this "old school" basics, it is important and effective and any business owner or employee can do it.


Keyword selection is first

Listing your business in these online business directories will not be effective if you don't kow what keyword phrases to use when promoting your business. This article is not about finding out your best and most competitive keywords. This is something that you should have already done.

I highly recommend getting your website search engine optimized because the first part of that is coming up with a list of keyword phrases and assigning one to four keyword phrases to each page of your website. Follow the link for more information on how to find the right keywords.

The most effective way to list your company

The reason I emphasized having a list of keyword phrases first is because when you create your business listing, you want to create a link to your website Home page. Too often, businesses will simply use the name of their website as anchor text for their link back or worse, just show the plain HTML link like this:

http://www.orgborg.com/index.htm

By using one of your primary keyword phrases for your Home page as the anchor text, Google and people who find your listing, will see the search words they probably were looking for and it will lead to a page of your website that contains information about that subject. This imporves your Google PageRank, your search engine rankings, and strengthens the association of that keyword phrase with your website. And it's good advertising.

In other words, this is what your link should look like if your primary keyword phrase for your Home page is "Used car parts."

Minneapolis Used Car Parts

Here is what the HTML would look like:

<a href="http://www.frankscarparts.com">Minneapolis Used Car Parts</a>

This is extremely important. I also recommend that if you have more than one keyword phrase for your Home page that you rotate the keyword phrases. In other words, if you have four keyword phrases, use a different one for each of the first four listings you create and then start over with the first one and continue the rotation until you've created listings in all the directories. This will give your four different keyword phrases to be found under rather than just one.

There are twenty different local directories where you can list your company. I highly recommend you list with all of them. And these businesses make their money off of paid listings so they make it difficult to find the free listings. However, persevere and just use the free listings. They are all you need.

Don't do all the free directory listings all at once. Google might see that as spamming and hurt your rankings. Better to do a few today, come back in a week or two and do a few more. Keep at it steadily until you have listed with all twenty. Here is the link to the listing of 20 Free Local Business Directories. Best of luck to you! And for more information about how to do Online Marketing campaigns, see the article Small Business Online Marketing Plan for 2009 - part one.

Check out our complete list of business marketing articles and online marketing articles!

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