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Driving Qualified Traffic Using Directories
by Lee Traupel
Some education is essential to enlighten you about this form of
interactive marketing. Directories aren't Search Engines; they are web
sites or information portals which use analysts on staff to review
submissions from companies who want to be listed in their Directory. Yahoo
would be the penultimate example of this type of a portal. But there are
literally thousands of other sites that group and list web sites based on
their analysis criteria. Here are some tips garnered from years of
providing these services to our clients.
1. How do you find Directories? I don't have an easy solution for you, as
we've spent years developing and refining (ongoing) our own list of
Directories. But, look around on the Internet using Search Engines to find
popular sites that list resources in your vertical market segment.
2. Directory listings are a great value, as they provide a long-term
listing, unlike Search Engine rankings which are much more volatile. Once
you achieve a listing you are typically locked into a Directory's database
for a very long time.
3. Let's start with the twenty-ton gorilla in this market, Yahoo! Spend
time carefully reviewing their various categories, then take the plunge
and use their "Business Express" service which costs just under $200.
(USD) to submit your site. Don't, I repeat don't submit unless you have
carefully analyzed where you belong in their huge category selections; if
you make a mistake you only have one chance to get a new or revised
listing, as they aren't very forgiving of those who don't do their
homework before submitting.
4. Be patient when submitting to Directories, as most are getting tens or
hundreds of thousands of submissions per day - it will take 30-90 days to
actually get listed. Keep an accurate record of sites you have posted to
and then check back 60-90 days later and resubmit if necessary, but don't
spam them, as this will not garner any results.
5. Never submit a site unless it is ready for primetime, with no broken
links, under construction pages, incomplete text, graphics that aren't
loading properly, etc. Indexers are very busy, once they see a site which
has problems they will click to the next entry on their list and your hard
work is to no avail.
6. Be prepared with the proper marketing materials for this type of a
campaign, including a working title for your site which is 6-8 words,
several groups of keywords that are separated by commas and spaces of
varying lengths, approx 10-20 and 30-75 keywords, and a longer description
of your site which can be one to two sentences.
7. Part of the required expertise involved in this process is in the
actual category selection - carefully select which category or categories
where you think your site fits by looking at others in this category to
determine if you fit into this classification.
8. Be aware we are seeing a shift to fee-based submissions to shortcut the
process - Yahoo started the trend over a year ago, now LookSmart and other
top tier Directories are starting to do the same. The tradeoff is of
course minimizing time to market - we recommend using the commercial
services to our clients.
9. Want to know if this process has actually done anything for you? Check
your log files or web site analysis software and look at where your
traffic is coming from.
10. If you are getting significant traffic from a small list of
Directories you may want to go back to their web site and pay for their
premium listing services to drive more traffic. These enhanced listings
services typically enable you to bold your listing or add graphical
content which enhances the textual description, usually only for a few
hundred dollars per year.
About The Author: Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business
development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective
Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a results-driven
marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients
encompassing startups to public companies. Lee@intelective.com
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