Using a Sales Directory to Your Advantage
A sales directory can be a very useful marketing tool – especially if your are interested in promoting your telemarketing company. Using a business listing will not only give your telemarketing service exposure, but it will help to establish your company as a player in the global telemarketing industry – but only if you plan your sales directory strategy properly. There is no point in simply choosing any old business listing for your telesales business. Unless you choose the right directory, your business listing is not likely to reap any real benefits.Choosing your directoryThe best way to make the most of a business listing is to pick the proper place for your business. If you are operating a very specialised telemarketing service, then you should try to find a sales directory that promotes such services. Another element to consider is the area that is covered by a sales directory. Choosing to list your business in a directory that does not cover the right areas is also a waste – as is choosing a directory that covers too large an area if your telemarketing company is not able to handle the volume of work that could be generated as a result.What to look forA good sales directory will generate traffic for your business listing. There is no point in selecting a directory that gives you a place to park your information. The sales directory should be actively trying to bring traffic to the site to choose from among their members. There are a number of ways that a business directory can generate traffic including useful content, a constant updating of news and facts about the industries listed in their directories and leads generation.The right informationOnce you have chosen the right sale directory for your telemarketing company, you should then think about fine tuning the information that you will list. It is not enough to just list your company name and contact details. Many companies are using business listings as a way of promoting their companies visually as well. If you have a logo for your company, that should definitely be placed in your listing. If you have pictures of your offices, you can upload those as well. If you have a website – then there should be a hyperlink to your site. You can also detail some of the services that you offer as part of your business listing.Telephone numbersMany people believe that it is best to have an 800 telephone number as their primary contact for their business. However, it is actually better to have your regular telephone number as your first point of contact and provide an 800 number as a courtesy. Most businesses want to target local clients and by providing a local number you will know from where your clients are contacting you.Using a sales directory is one of the smartest and most inexpensive ways of promoting your telemarketing company online. Not only will you get business that may not have otherwise found your company, but it is all at a nominal cost when compared with more traditional forms of advertising.
Choosing The Right Directories For Website Submissions
One of the quickest ways of gaining Page Rank and thus visitors to your site is to submit your site to links directories. But there are a myriad of directories out there, some free, others requiring payment for inclusion. Some only accept large sites with good content, others only accept top-level domains.As an internet marketer you want as much of your site indexed by the search engines as possible, especially for a new site. As a result you need to pick the right kind of directory to submit your site to.But why do you need to submit to these directories in the first place? The answer is ‘Page Rank’. This is an algorithm developed by Google’s Larry Page and Sergein Brin (hence Page Rank) that measures the value of a website based on the number of incoming links to that site. The higher the page rank of those incoming links and the the more one-directional (ie non-reciprocal) links you have the higher your Page Rank and the closer to the first page of a search engine’s results your site comes.It can take many years to grow these links organically and you can shortcut this process by submitting your site to links directories and increasing the number of in-bound links to your site by this means. But how do you know which directories to link to? What should you be looking for in a good links directory?The most important factor is that the directory should be ‘SEO-friendly’. This means that all links in the directory can be followed and indexed by the major search engines. You should examine a random page in the directory to make sure that the pages do not have the following META tag: . This tag means that any links on a page containing it will be ignored. In essence any links will not be indexed and neither will they be followed to your site. Any site with this meta tag on its pages will be useless for your SEO efforts.The next thing to look out for is how the links to the sites presented on the links pages are presented. The links themselves should be of plain format eg: Celtnet Information Site . What you don’t want are indirect links of the form: Your Website . Though this link can be followed to your site it does not actually present your URL to the indexing spiders so your URL will not be included in the search databases and you will gain no page rank from this.Even if the site presents plain URLs it’s still important to look out for another trick. What you don’t want within the URL definition is the tag rel=”nofollow”. So that a link of the form: Celtnet is useless for SEO purposes as the ‘nofollow’ tag tells the indexing spiders to ignore it.Links should also not be served by JavaScirpt, as indexing spiders ignore JavaScript. Any directories using these methods are not SEO-friendly and will not aid your site in being indexed and in gaining page rank. Such sites only serve the interests of webmasters and not your interest.If a directory is to be considered SEO-friendly then it should employ none of the tricks detailed above. This actually significantly reduces the number of directories to which it’s worth submitting your website.What this means is that you should do your own due diligence analyses when thinking of submitting your site to any Internet Directory.