Getting your Citations Noticed.
St. Louis Business Citation Management
Correctly managing your business' online citations is a solid corner of your online SEO strategy. Directory and citation sites speak volumes about your company, and can help with your company's reputation. Directories provide a chance for consumers to find out more about your business, are a great source of backlinks from trusted sources, and provide additional data for search engines to crawl to verify who you are.
Getting your St. Louis SEO right where it needs to be.
Knowing Which Citations Matter
There can also be a dark side to directory submissions. Just like with web sites, not all directories are good. Submitting your site to a penalized or banned directory can hurt the rank of your site, and in the worst case scenario, get your site removed from search results. Keep reading to find out how Hexxen can get your business ranking higher through our St. Louis business directory listing services.
Knowing the citations that make a difference.
Pushing vs. Pulling: The Powerhouse Directories
Hexxen offers SEO consultant services in St. Louis that achieve top ranking results in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We offer a wide range of skills and specialties that allow us to cover every facet of your online marketing strategy. Our creative team can bring your ideas to life while our technical St. Louis SEO team make your site show up in the top positions of search results.
Things To Know About Business Citations
The first step in knowing what are the most effective local business directories, is to know some super secret information. (Be prepared). Not all directories actively feed Google, Bing and Yahoo directly. Some directory sites supply information in what is known as a "passive feed". Passive feed sites allow data to be collected when their database is crawled by a search engine, and looks for changes or new information (i.e. your new business listing).
These are the least desirable of local business listing directories, as they don't supply the information when it's created. The time between when your listing is created to when it actually displays in a search engine result could be months, if ever. This can still provide value however, as the listing is yet another way of verifying your business details once the listing is crawled.
The larger directories are usually the most desirable listings, but also have the highest competition when displaying your listing. For example, when you create your free listing on Yelp, your business could have other company's listing show up next to yours, giving the user a lot of choices on which company to select. Making sure your listing is as complete as possible can help your company show up higher, as many directory sites award more time spent on the details, and "completeness" of your listing.
Selecting to list on the larger directories can be more effective, as they supply an "active feed" to Google, Bing and Yahoo. This means your listing is pushed to the Search Engines, rather than waiting for them to crawl the database directory. It may sound absurd that the search engine providers would accept this information, but remember that the Search Engines always look for fresh, new information to display in results, and give weight to trusted directory and citation sites with high pagerank.
Citation Listing – Description
There is a lot of confusion between what is considered a citation site, and a link directory. Some would argue they are the same, but in truth they are very different. Citation sites are those that allow you to "cite" information about your business, and often provide an area to leave a short description. Popular citation sites include Yellowbook and many others. These will normally show up in search results, and provide an active feed to Google's database of information about your business. Since there are so many different citation sites, some companies offer a way to claim your listings quickly through automated software, albeit at a cost.
Directory Listing – Description
Directory sites are a bit different. Most directory sites only allow a very short sentence about your business, organized into very specific categories. For example, this site is listed in the search engine optimization category in many directory sites. One thing we pay special attention to is the not only the page rank of the directory you will be listed on, but the page rank of the category you will be listed in. Many SEO's make the mistake of submitting to a directory due to the high rank of the home page, and the actual page your site is listed on is zero. Don't fall victim to an "SEO package" that appears like a good value on paper, only to have the work that is involved be ineffective. For more information about directories, you can read this article about directory links by Search Engine Watch.
Hexxen only submits your site to verified, trusted citation sites and link directories. One of the reasons we don't offer one-size-fits-all SEO packages is that no business generally fits into any given category, and no two search marketing campaigns are the same. Get in touch to see how we can broaden the exposure of your business, and increase your leads through directory submissions and citation sites.
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