Getting Your Company Listed with Bing.com

Jun 252009
 

Bing.com is a new search engine that is being touted as the next big thing, at least that’s what Microsoft is hoping. They’ve pumped metric tons of money into marketing it as Google’s new competitor, but the jury still seems to be deliberating about that. Still, as Bing buzz builds, it couldn’t hurt to get listed on their local listings right?

I’ve talked a few clients through the process of registering their business with Google and, based on that experience, the idea of talking someone through the same process on Bing is a little more daunting, but doable. Here’s a comparison of the user experience for each site:

Google’s Home Page:

The process:

Step 1. Get a Google Account, if you don’t have one already.
Step 2. Go to Google.com and click on “Business Solutions” below the search terms window.
Step 3. On the next page, click on “Local Business Center” in the bottom half of the page.

Now you are all set to start listing your business with Google. One precaution: Make sure you are near your business phone so you can verify your listing with Google’s automated call to your business phone. They will call with a PIN that you will need to verify that this is actually your business.

Bing.com’s Home Page:

The Process:

Step 1: If you haven’t already, sign up for a Windows Live account (click on “Windows Live” in the top left corner of the page to get started)
Step 2: With your Windows Live email and password on hand, go to Bing’s home page and select “Maps” from the search options listed under the main search field.
Step 3: In the Maps page search field, enter either your business name or your location and business category.

Step 4: In the listing of search results, scroll all the way down until you see the words “local listing center” in page gray and click on that to get started with your listing.

Now for the real way to do this.
Go to: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
-and sign up from there.
I only listed these steps out to illustrate the fact that Bing’s method is; 4 (non-intuitive) steps as opposed to Google’s 2 somewhat obvious ones and that trying to explain this to a client over the phone is not high on my list of fun and easy activities. The only bright spot in all this is that, at the end of the sign-up process, Bing.com promises to send you a letter for verification about your listing as opposed to a phone call that can take some people by surprise.

How Does Your Business Look Online?

Mar 112009
 

Here’s a good exercise to help you get motivated to update your site: Google your business name.

I am in the process of updating a map for a site I developed and it involves googling almost every local retail business in order to link to their websites. Surprisingly, quite a few don’t. Instead, when I google their business name, what tends to come up are: 1) Newspaper articles that mention the business, 2) blog posts that mention the business and 3) Review sites such as Yelp and Merchant Circle.

The last category is where a lot of businesses lose out on a great free tool for getting their name out there. Some sites are membership-based, requiring people to join before they can post their reviews of local businesses. Others are more focused on the business owner and helping them to develop a business to business network. Here’s a list of the sites that I visited and a little about the ins and outs of listing your business with them:

  • Superpages/Switchboard: When you land on this site, go to the bottom of the page where it says: “Add or Edit Listing”. Click on that and you’ll go to a page where you will be prompted to enter your business phone number in order to find out if you are already listed. If you are not, then you will need to go through the process of filling in your business info and then signing up for a free account. Of course, they will offer you options such as having your logo with your listing for “only” $25 per month, but there are free options out there, so try it, see how you like the services and then decide if it’s worth the money.
  • Yellowpages: Just like SuperPages and Switchboard, Yellowpages is part of the Idearc Empire and, like any empire, they want to control the world. If you own a business, you’ve probably received a few sales calls from them, but, it is possible to sign up for a free business listing. The only catch is that they inform you after you’ve gone through the listing process that it may take 30 days to display your listing and “you will be contacted by a sales representative”. Oh boy. To get started, just go to the home page and click on the black button at the bottom of the page that says “Get your free listing”.
  • Boston City Search: At the bottom of the home page, there’s a link entitled “List your business on City Search”. It does cost, and they don’t tell you how much it will cost until you start signing up for a plan. The “$30 off” offer tells me that it’s kind of costly.
  • Manta: Manta pulls its listings from Dun & Bradstreet. Therefore, you should get a listing with them first before attempting to get into their listings. I wish they had told me this before I went through the fairly involved process of setting up an account on their site. The site seems to be focused on business to business interactions, so if you are constantly scouring the web for suitable vendors, then this may be worth your time to set up.
  • Citysquares: Basically the way this works is that you search for your business, sign up for a free listing, and then they want you to pay upwards from $50 a month to upgrade your listing including being able to link to your site from the listing.
  • Merchant Circle: On the home page, you will be prompted to enter your business number, then it shoots you onto a page where you can sign up for a membership. They email you, you confirm the email and then you go to another page where there’s a list of the plans offered. They range from $30-$250 a month. Never fear, there’s a light gray link next to the plans that says “But I thought it was free!” Click on that. Now, on the next page, in the top right corner, click on “No Thanks, set up my profile”. You get a pretty meaty listing, with a link to your own site and the ability to generate coupons. I signed up and within 48 hours, my listing showed up near the top of a search for “Web Design” in “Salem MA”
  • Yelp: At the top right of the page, click on Yelp for Business Owners. From there, you simply follow the prompts to set up your business listing.

Then what?

Recruit your network of friends, relatives and loyal customers to support your business by asking them to post some reviews on the various sites. Trade reviews with other business owners, offer discounts/deals to customers who post reviews, cook dinner for people, whatever. Every little bit helps to enhance your presence online and drive traffic to your business!

How To Measure Your Site Traffic With Yahoo Hosting

Jan 282009
 

If you have a Yahoo-hosted site, then you have the resources of a very powerful tool for your web site at your disposal. Yahoo integrates a good range of services into a small business hosting account and they are also a strong SEO player with search engine marketing products. While Yahoo does have some detractors, it’s still a good choice if you want to be able to track your web site’s hits without too much fuss. Continue reading »

C & E Search Engine Tactics: 2. Sowing Your Links

Jan 132009
 

We’re all familiar with the SEO mantra “ranking is determined in part by the number of pages that link back to your site.” While that is a big slice of the magic pie of good search results rankings, it is a concept that leaves many people wondering how all those wonderful links are created. Plenty of companies are poised to pounce on your money with their promise of acquiring links by the bushel for you, but do you really need to spend any money at all? Continue reading »

C&E Search Engine Tactics: 1. Getting Connected

Jan 102009
 


Whether you’ve been to a business meeting or dinner with your teenaged niece, chances are high that you’ve heard at least 200 references to social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. And, if you’re like me, after hearing those names about 199 times you started to get curious about what those sites are about. For a while I used the excuse that I was too busy actually working to spend time tracking tweets and updating my online “mood” of the moment. Continue reading »

Google’s mysteries revealed

Nov 052008
 

This is an article I found today on Lorelle’s amazing WordPress blog. It’s the perfect answer to that ever-popular question, “How do I get my site to rank high in Google?” I wish there was a “silver bullet answer” to this question too, but it’s a not so much a magic formula as it is a carefully planned campaign.
Lorelle does a great job of explaining the various factors, but in a nutshell, Google bases it’s page ranking system on a combination of the following factors:

Links: Quality over quantity. Don’t go for those “pay for us to link to you” services. Google prefers a few links to your site on well established web sites rather than a ton of links on spam sites.

Domain Age: Spam sites tend to be fly-by-night operations and the longer your site has been around, the better. However, just letting your site sit there on the server isn’t enough. Google also notices the freshness of your site’s content.

Click Through Rate: Google checks on how people find your site and how they get there, whether via a search engine or from a bookmarking site.

Trends, fads and seasons: Keywords have trends too. So you can probably stop typing in “Paris Hilton Video” into your meta-tags now. ;^}

Posting Frequency: Like Alex the Lion says in Madagascar “You know, keep it fresh!”. The more you reward your loyal visitors with useful new information, the more they will visit and recommend your site via incoming links.

Keywords: There are a few areas where it’s really important to place the words that you think people will use to search for your site. Titles, as in the title that shows up at the top of your browser when you view a page, links, headings and tags.

Traffic: How heavily your site is visited, which pages people go to and how long they spend clicking around.

Code: It’s important to keep your site’s code clean and easy to scan through. Hiding your text in a fancy animation or burying important info under tons of scripting makes the engine work harder. I tend to think of code as being like motor oil, the cleaner it is, the smoother your site runs.

Jennsweb’s Excellent SEO Glossary

Mar 102008
 

For anyone who’s ever wondered what phrases like “pinging Technorati’s rss feed for Diggs” mean.

Delicious: Del.icio.us is at heart, an online service that lets you bookmark pages on the web under a user name. Whenever you save a page’s URL, Del.icio.us’s user interface asks you to tag the page with keywords. These keyword tags are used to index the page in a searchable database. Entering a keyword such as “design” in a search will reveal all pages tagged with that keyword. The fun comes when Continue reading »

RSS: a guide to weeding the web

Feb 282008
 


What is RSS and why should I care?

RSS is an acronym for several variations of the same idea. Some people take it to mean Rich Site Summary. Others like the meaning RDF Site Summary, but for the majority of users out there, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. Continue reading »

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers that blog them

Jan 252008
 

I’ve been acting like a squirrel on crack with Del.icio.us over the past 2 years. In the course of trying to grow a web design business from something done on the side, when I’ve got free time on the weekend, through the part time graphic design job with the difference made up with web clients, to taking the plunge into the full time freelance world, every time I researched a different aspect of the web, I would hit Google and bookmark every decent article I could get my hands on.

The following list is the first of (hopefully) many where I share the best of the best on various topics such as Search Engine Optimization, hosting, web technologies and this one, blogging.
Continue reading »