For those of you who may be new to promoting your business online, I am offering you this word of advice. Be sure you claim as many online business listing profiles as you can. It is one thing to build a website. It is altogether another thing to have the search engines notice it. You will need to submit the site for indexing to Google, Yahoo and Bing to start. But in addition, there are many additional business listing resources on which you can claim your free profile.
One good place to start is www.getlisted.org . Just enter your business name and zip code, click submit, and you will get about thirteen places you can hop onto and claim your business profile. The more of these sources, which I refer to as "horizontal networking", you are listed with, the better. When the search engines are looking for information about your company to include in searches, they reference these places. Check out this link for more info: http://searchengineland.com/crush-the-competition-with-hyper-local-listing-management-170467?goback=%2Egde_77625_member_270254806#%21 Localeze is a good example of this. It doesn't matter whether you have heard of them (such as Nokia, HotFrog or Best of the Web) or not. The search engines are aware of them. You should have a standard profile of information about your business on all of them.
Additionally, one that you will not find at getlisted.org is www.manta.com . Manta is a good business-to-business resource for doing research on a potential client or company. And their basic business profile service is free.
On any of these, there may be additional visibility functions (advertising) that may be offered, but to get your company profile listed is no charge. Just ignore offers about which you are not interested.
And be sure to include your web address, email, photos and videos if the listing source has places for them. If you do these few things (and this is not an exhaustive list), you will do much toward increasing your online footprint. People can't do business with you if they don't know about you, or if they don't have enough information to know whether to do business with you or not.
Do one profile source a day, or five a week, or however you can fit it in, but be sure you do it. The alternative is to pay someone to do an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) program for you. This is only one part of SEO, but if you don't do it, someone should. I am just trying to save you a little money.
Your homework has been assigned. Get to it!
