Pinkorpunk.com is a fairly new website, which may partially explain its PageRank of 0. But, the other factor in the ranking is the site’s small number of inbound links. Yahoo! sees 45 links from outside sites while Google doesn’t list any at all. Inbound links translate to PageRank, and higher PageRank translates to better search engine results. This site, with its vibrant content, should have no problem garnering links! A linking campaign is in order here. Research online directories and get listed in those that still have decent PageRank (many have been recently demoted by Google in that regard). A blog is also in order, especially with such hip content. Online press should be a target as well, as should social media avenues like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook.

For more about this niche eCommerce store, visit the Practical eCommerce website audit here.

Don’t be afraid to do something off-color. Most folks in the corporate communications, PR, and legal departments shy away from anything potentially controversial. And for good reason, right? Then why would a company selling life insurance online dare to venture into the taboo topic of weird and disturbing death trivia? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly what Lifeinsure.com did with their link bait article, “19 Things You Didn’t Know About Death.” With such goodies as “After being decapitated, the average person remains conscious for an additional 15-20 seconds,” you can imagine how much of a hit it was with the irreverent alpha-geeks that make up the Digg community. The article made it to the Digg front page, which in turn got it in front of countless bloggers and social bookmarkers. Surely the success of this article in attracting links has contributed to Lifeinsure.com’s impressive #4 ranking for “life insurance.” Not surprisingly though, this contentious article is nowhere to be found in Lifeinsure.com’s navigation hierarchy, so customers and prospects are unlikely to stumble across it (phew!).

Deviate from your core business. Successful enterprises are built on the relentless pursuit of excellence in their core business, trimming the fat, and outsourcing the rest. It may seem like a bad idea for an SEO firm like ours to own a bed and breakfast directory and a writers community. But the great links these sites attract make it a good investment.

Netconcepts benefits from these links in two ways: link juice is passed from these sites to our own corporate site, and both sites’ rankings have earned (and continue to earn) us a respectable passive income from Google AdSense (six figures for each site, in total, to date). Our firm also develops WordPress plugins and distributes them for free on our corporate site (netconcepts.com). Dedicating resources to WordPress plugin development when the market for WordPress is mostly made up of individuals and small businesses may seem counterintuitive, given that our focus is SEO for ecommerce and that our target market is large, brand name retailers. But it works. Our free SEO Title Tag plugin has been a magnet for links from bloggers, to the point that the traffic to the plugin page now exceeds that of our home page.

Do it for a good cause. The linkerati love a good corporate citizen, so be one. Consider such activities not as an expense, but as an investment that will generate a return in the form of links. With Second Chance Trees, social media marketing agency Converseon really went out on a limb (ugh, bad pun, I know!)—creating a charitable initiative using internal resource and expertise that could have instead been put on to billable work. The idea was to create an island in Second Life where players could purchase a virtual tree with Linden dollars and plant it. This would then trigger the planting of a real tree of the same species in an ecologically sensitive region, such as a Central or South American rain forest. For a charitable endeavor, the payoff was huge. High-value links came from news outlets, the blogosphere, organizations, and elsewhere. Nicely done, Converseon!

Be bold, be off-the-wall. You don’t always have to toe the corporate line. If you’re thinking that this will garner links that aren’t very relevant to your business and industry, you’re probably right. But remember that PageRank is topic independent. Time after time, the tests we conduct at Netconcepts show that high PageRank endowed yet topically irrelevant links still help—and they can help a lot. Definitely still work to acquire topically relevant links as well, but don’t neglect the off-topic ones too.

There are a lot of local businesses out there that have no addresses. These are frequently independent contractors like plumbers, electricians, mobile auto repairmen, house painters, roofing contractors, building contractors, and so on. These guys may operate out of their vans and trucks, and are not set up for having the public show up on their doorstep.

A brick-and-mortar location for a business is not just its "home base.” A store with a sign out front typically serves as a kind of advertisement, too, allowing passers-by to spontaneously decide to drop in, or to file the biz away in their memory for any future needs. The address-less types of businesses don’t get to benefit from this type of in situ advertising, and so they’re even more dependent upon other advertising such as newspaper, yellow pages, television, and internet—as well as word-of-mouth.

So, here you have these traditional service providers flung abruptly into the modern world of rapidly-evolving local search. As printed phone book usage may be decreasing, these guys need internet presence and they know it. The savvier ones also know that people are increasingly searching for businesses via search engines, and particularly in local search engines.

For these guys who need biz directory placement, it really kills them if they can’t get into a service like Google Maps.

Just to get a feel for the scope of the issue, compare the results in Google Maps for a search for "Plumbers in Dallas, TX":

If you scroll through the listings, you’ll notice that only businesses with actual street addresses are listed in the first page of results.

By contrast, in yellow pages sites like Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, and Yellowbook.com, as well as in some of the other local search sites like Yahoo! Local and Live Search Maps, quite a number of plumbers who don’t have physical addresses displayed are also included in the results.

With Google’s local search popularity on the rise, these small businesses are getting more and more driven to get into the listings.

So, what was Michael Jones’s answer to Dick’s question—how are businesses with no addresses supposed to get into Google Maps results?

He essentially said that they should try to get an address in the city because Google did not display businesses that didn’t have addresses—after all, he quipped, one can’t pinpoint something without an address on the map. He suggested that those businesses could rent a post box to accomplish this.

I found this suggestion surprising and a bit disappointing. I’d rather expected him to declare that they expected to soon deploy a new version that would allow some method of displaying local businesses that didn’t have specific addresses.

I’d actually recommended that businesses might use rented mail boxes to get better Maps rankings as a sort of "extreme local search tactic" way back in January of 2007, but I did that while figuring that few businesses were likely to actually do that. The tactic is apparently not so "extreme" after all. Google Maps help provides similar advice.

Hearing this method recommended by Google was surprising to many of us, because it seems like something of a hack—it is a hack. The expected/needed functionality isn’t there, so you have to resort to doing something nonintuitive/unnatural to make it work.

There are rare cases where Google Maps does display a business without an address:

Maps personnel suggest this may have happened due to "incomplete" data from yellow pages providers. The data may be incomplete from Google’s perspective, but YP sites allow display without an address, as mentioned above.

This is not the only case where businesses might have to go through Google’s yellow pages partners to achieve presentation treatment they’ve grown to expect as a standard directory feature. Mike Blumenthal has outlined how Google’s sharply limited number of business categories has also caused some heartburn, and those wishing for a more granular category designation would likely also have to achieve it through their listings at a yellow pages site.

Google’s desire to use mailing addresses to verify businesses seems reasonable, but it shouldn’t be necessary to actually display the address. It’s also reasonable to say that a graphic map interface perhaps shouldn’t be pinpointing items without specific addresses—in the screen grab above, the address is defaulting to a city or ZIP code centroid, making the business location appear to be floating out in an area without roads. This aspect is a bit of a downer from a user-experience perspective.

Google Maps isn’t purely just the graphic map, though. The listings at the side of the map and the listings appearing in regular keyword search results for local queries provide a more traditional directory format. It could be possible to display the addressless businesses in these listings without pinpointing them on the map.

While Google’s decisions around this are founded on their usual, laudable pro-user-experience bias, this situation isn’t at all desirable from the user’s perspective, either. Most small, established businesses have expectation of being represented in directories and don’t know that they need to rent a post-box to appear here. So, these logic rules are reducing the degree of choice available among providers and reducing competition. Google factors ratings into their rankings, too, and one may assume that some of the best businesses in a local area may not be appearing in Google Maps search results.

If you are one of the small businesses who desires presence in Google Maps without listing your actual street address, I’d recommend that you get your mailbox service at a UPS Store, since it will allow you to use a full street address instead of just a PO box.

Search engines also love fresh content, and blogs, by definition, are constant sources of new content. If written correctly – or more specifically interestingly – blogs can also provide wider link bait and garner links from outside the blogosphere. Search engines, of course, reward for good, inbound links regardless of whether they’re from other blogs.

Jeff Muendel, Natural Search Analyst for Netconcepts, recommends that eCommerce sites take full advantage of WordPress, a blogging platform that offers a host of SEO-friendly options to allow for excellent search engine optimization. To read more about Jeff’s expert advice about WordPress and plug-ins, like the Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plugin, visit the full article on Practical eCommerce.

One of the questions she covers is: Will blogging really help?

If the blog is optimally created and maintained, with a transparent, sincere voice and a commitment to using it to build relationships as well as links, then, yes, it will help. How much? That depends on how much the company is willing to invest in developing relationships with customers and prospects in the blogosphere. The only time blogging can really hurt is if the bloggers are insincere and dishonest and ignore their audience, or if your company has a god-awful online reputation in the first place. If you’re in a war of attrition over your company’s online reputation, it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than a simple blog to fix the mess you’re in.

For more about this topic, visit the full article about getting started in blogging at ClickZ.

A few weeks ago, Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, announced the advent of Google Knol, a program meant to challenge Wikipedia, the popular user-generated encyclopedia. The idea, like Wikipedia, is to let anyone create a page of information on a specific topic, and all of those pages will be organized like an online encyclopedia. Google has not announced when Knol will launch.

Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about how this upcoming feature from search giant, Google, may affect eCommerce.

Jeff reminds us that if you perform a lot of online searches, often Wikipedia will show up in page one of Google results. If Google’s new project will be poised to compete, Jeff provides a few recommendations for online retailers to make sure they keep up with (and take advantage) of this new technology when it appears.

Keep an eye out for the beginning of public access to Knol and be ready to assert yourself with regard to your area of expertise. Position yourself as an expert on a subject that is related to what you sell. Sign up with the program and carve out your niche immediately by writing an article or several articles that are neutral and honest. Use the bio section to correlate yourself with your ecommerce site. Above all, though, offer real and accurate information in the articles that makes no reference to your company.

The goal here is to get in early on an encyclopedia service that is sure to be high in Google results.

As the finale of this three part series on searchandising, PJ Fusco offers her recommendations on how:

…you can enhance the contextual relevancy of critical category pages within a complex database-driven Web site by understanding what keywords and phrases drive your revenue. But you still need to contend with that wonky pagination scheme that’s killing your crawl equity.

For more expert advice from PJ, lead strategist for Netconcepts, on this topic, visit the conclusion of this three part series on searchandising.

To achieve that search engine optimal configuration of your internal linking structure, you need to think strategically about how you “spend” the link juice that has been bestowed on your site through inbound links.

Think of these inbound links as “votes,” and remember that we’re dealing with a meritocracy here, and not a democracy. In other words, not all “votes” are created equal. Of all the pages of your site, it’s probably the home page that has earned the most and best votes and is the most endowed with PageRank. Therefore, your site’s hierarchical tree structure largely determines how your link juice is “spent” within your site. So, I hope you organized your site tree with SEO in mind, not just usability!

One of the most powerful, and most underdeveloped, on-page SEO tactics is rejigging your internal hierarchical linking structure to optimize the flow of link juice. I’ve written about this before, in the context of tag clouds and of breadcrumb navigation. But there’s another way to optimize to your internal linking structure: selectively “nofollowing” some of your internal links. Google engineer Matt Cutts refers to this tactic as “sculpting your PageRank.”

Rel=nofollow (which can be inserted into the HTML of the link like so: <a rel=nofollow href=”whereever”>) was originally developed by the search engines to remove the incentive for blog comment spamming, and the search engines positioned the nofollow as a way to not “vouch” for a link (i.e., not treat it as a “vote” that passes link juice). But the engines have evolved their thinking. They realize now that rel=nofollow is a much more versatile tool than when it was first conceived. Matt Cutts of Google was quoted recently as saying:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g., a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

The way I interpret Matt’s reference to “link-level granularity” as “laser-like precision” — as in: the size and shape of your site’s navigational hierarchy is your blunt instrument and rel=nofollow is your scalpel.

So whip out the scalpel and nofollow your links to low-value internal pages such as: Legal Notices, Privacy Policy, Order Status, Customer Help Center, Testimonials, Email Us, View Shopping Cart, My Account, FAQ, About Us, and Shipping Info. This technique is valid for low-value outbound links too, such as “Click to Verify” VeriSign and HackerSafe seals. Doing so will save a larger share of PageRank for the remaining links to your more important pages (e.g., category pages).

In my interview with Matt Cutts at PubCon, Matt confirmed that links with rel=nofollow weren’t “used for discovery; they are not used for PageRank; they are not used for anchor text in any way.”

Speaking of anchor text, that brings to mind another use for nofollows on internal links: when the anchor text is suboptimal and the link is redundant. For example, I’ve seen countless blogs with multiple links to the same permalink page: one uses the post title as the anchor text, and the others contain such throwaway anchor text as “Continue Reading,” “Comments,” or “Permalink.” In fact, that was one of my Twelve Mistakes that Most Bloggers Make (Mistake #5, to be exact). On ecommerce sites, you’ll see this same phenomenon manifest itself as redundant links leading to product pages: one uses the product name, the other uses throwaway phrases like “Click Here” or “Order Now” or “Product Info” or the product’s price; or the link is an image of the product with an alt attribute of “product_image.”

The first place to begin sculpting PageRank is on your home page, because that page holds so much weight in the search engines’ eyes. Typically, the home page needs fewer links to new or recently-reviewed products, and more to top-selling (and high margin) products, categories, and sub-categories. Often, I’ll see that a retailer’s home page has well over Google’s recommended “100 links per page.” In my aforementioned interview with Matt, he offered further insight into Google’s “100 links” guideline:

“The reason for the 100 links per page guideline is because we used to crawl only about the first 101 kilobytes of a page. If somebody had a lot more than a hundred links, then it was a little more likely that after we truncated the page at a 100 kilobytes, that page would get truncated and some of the links would not be followed or would not be counted. Nowadays, I forget exactly how much we crawl and index and save, but I think it is at least, we are willing to save half a megabyte from each page. So, if you look at the guidelines, we have two sets of guidelines on one page. We have: quality guidelines which are essentially spam and how to avoid spam; and we have technical guidelines. The technical guidelines are more like best practices. So, the 100 links is more like a “best practice” suggestion, because if you keep it under 100, you are guaranteed you are never get truncated.”

By using the “Disable JavaScript” and “View Link Information” functions of the Web Developer Firefox extension, in that order, you can easily obtain your page’s outbound link count. Try to keep it to a reasonable number (ideally under 100), and remember that the more links you have on the page, the smaller the slice of PageRank that each link receives.

To get some insight into how some of the bigger online retailers were sculpting PageRank, I culled through Internet Retailer magazine’s “Hot 100″ Retail Websites using the SEO for Firefox extension, which highlights nofollowed links in red. I wasn’t surprised when I found that hardly any of them employed “nofollows” on their home page to sculpt PageRank. In fact, I found only one doing it to any real degree: Altrec, an outdoor sports retailer that competes with the likes of REI and Cabela’s. Altrec have chosen not to squander their hard-earned link juice on scrolling headlines, Live Chat, “My Store,” and social bookmark services. Admittedly, they could have gone further and nofollowed “Today’s Deal,” “Give Us Your Feedback,” “Shipping & Ordering,” “Privacy & Security,” and “EASY Returns,” to name a few.

Digging a little deeper, I found that Altrec implements nofollows across their site. Sizes, expanded views, duplicate pages, and hot links are all “nofollowed” to sculpt PageRank. As a result, they’ve reduced duplication and passed a larger amount of link juice to their category pages, which appear to rank extremely well. Heck, even product pages have a PageRank of four in many cases. Admittedly, there are many more opportunities for them to further hone the flow of link juice, but they’re off to a great start.

So, what are you waiting for? Get sculpting!

As the middle of this three-part article, adventures in searchandising part two, PJ describes the effect of guided navigation and extreme pagination on the search engines. She writes,

It takes longer to crawl a searchandise-bloated site, so crawl efficiency is dampened. Over time, spiders take smaller bites of the site each time they visit, so indexed pages become stale. Fusty pages get fewer click-throughs, reduced traffic inhibits link building and page popularity, and so the downward spiral of search engine invisibility begins — all because the site provides a great user experience.

What can an e-commerce site do to add context and meaning to navigational searchandising and avoid the affects of extreme pagination while delivering a superior user experience? We’ll talk about some options next time.

With detailed examples and PJ’s expertise, this article focuses on the challenges many eCommerce sites face while they try to “searchandise.” For how to navigate through this fascinating aspect of online retail merchandising, read more about PJ’s recommended solutions in Part Three.

Most listings in yellow pages and local search engines may be comprised of just a basic name, address, and phone number. But businesses should take the trouble to add in as much of the other elements as they can since all the information provides differentiation and helpful information for consumers. In many local search and directory sites, most of the enhancement data can be added in for free, yet millions of businesses have never taken advantage of the full scope of free advertising available to them.

Here’s an annotated guide to a comprehensive business profile for local listings in the U.S.:

Business name. While this element may seem straightforward, it’s possible for you to adjust your company name or name usage convention in such a way as to derive more natural referral traffic online. While it’s easiest to trademark a unique/esoteric name, if it’s not combined with keyword terms that are most apropos to your business, you could miss out on some referrals over time. And, for a good many directories there is still alphabetic ordering going on, which can keep you ranking lower than if you could adjust your name to begin with earlier letters in the alphabet. “Xetera” might be distinctive as a gift shop name, but you might think of changing it to “And Xetera, Gifts” so that it might include your main keyword and rank high in alpha sorting.

Street address. A business’s street address is one of the most important parameters for appearing in local search results and enabling consumers to locate their stores, but many businesses seem to be careless in correcting or adjusting them to function well online. There’s lots of variation that can happen in how addresses are written, and the top online mapping systems don’t universally recognize the variations and pinpoint them identically. I see many business addresses like “80 US 40″ or something similarly user-unfriendly, which could potentially be interpreted a few ways, since roads might be cited in a few different formats: Rd, Road, Highway, Hwy, US, Interstate, F&M, Farm & Market Road, FM, H, I, etc.

In some areas, roads can be cited in multiple ways. Here in Dallas, Interstate Highway 35 is a major artery, but sections of it have been called different names, like: “North Stemmons Freeway,” “R.L Thornton Freeway,” I-35, I-35 North, and I-35 South.

Particularly sensitive are streets which have both a North & South or East and West version—there are cases where address on such streets can be incorrectly interpreted by search engines and mapping systems, resulting in bad maps/directions. For instance, “330 East Corporate Drive, Lewisville, TX” may not be interpreted the same as “330 Corporate Drive East, Lewisville, TX.” Human users and postmen may interpret both correctly, but one variation may not work as well in online mapping and search. I won’t regale you with the story of when I made up erroneous maps to my brother’s wedding rehearsal dinner due to this common issue!

While a human user might see and interpret your address correctly, you should check to see if major online mapping systems like Mapquest, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and MSN Maps can pinpoint correctly as well. Mild correction or adjustment to how you write your address in each directory may ensure that maps and driving directions work.

Newer streets and addresses often causes businesses heartburn, as there is typically a one to two year time lag in getting the new streets to appear in online mapping systems. Nagging each of the top online map providers may help you get this fixed sooner in online maps.

Some local businesses simply do not have a fixed location and may operate out of their truck or something, such as in the cases of plumbers and contractors. In internet directories, local search engines, and online map sites, not having an address can be a big disadvantage. Local search engines often rank listings in order of proximity to a city center and only display businesses they can display on maps, and businesses with no address or post office box addresses end up being left out of results entirely.

If your business doesn’t have a street address, I recommend that you rent a mailbox from a mail store or a UPS Store, and consider choosing a store that’s close to the center of most of the online mapping services. Renting a box can give you a street address and will make you start appearing in many more online searches, nearly overnight!

Geocode. These are the hidden, numerical coordinate values which are frequently associated with address data in business directories. When directories, search engines, or mapping systems receive a new street address, they geocode the addresses, assigning the numerical longitude and latitude values to pinpoint the location. You don’t need to worry about these unless your address is persistently pinpointed incorrectly in various systems. If it is, you might want to research out the best geocode for your business location, and then supply it directly to the directories which are not displaying the location pinpoint properly.

Sometimes addresses which can’t be properly geocoded get defaulted to pinpoint to a city or zip code centroid, and there can be differences in geocodes which pinpoint to a spot in the middle of a street versus a rooftop accuracy pinpoint.

Some services may allow business owners to drag and drop map pinpoints to update geocodes behind the scenes.

Maps. Maps are an element cropping up alongside business listings, or listing pages often include maps pinpointing the listing locations. The address and geocode elements mentioned above most directly affect map accuracy. In some cases, maps and map features of an area don’t reflect a precise, one-to-one relationship with reality, so even correct geocodes can pinpoint less than optimally in some systems.

City & state. Name of the city and state where your business is located. Be sure to use standard nomenclature with the city name, as opposed to colloquial nicknames (e.g., “New York,” not “NYC” nor “The Big Apple”).

ZIP code. Postal code for the address — some have asked me before whether it helps to include the ZIP+4. ZIP code is necessary, but I suggest against adding the plus-four extension. I don’t believe it helps for precise pinpointing in local search and online maps, and it’s primarily for post office routing.

Main telephone number. The phone number is often the gateway between a consumer and your business, so these naturally must be correct. One big mistake that some make is the insistence upon having directories display their vanity numbers—instead of just displaying the area code, prefix, and suffix, they may want their vanity numbers (alphabetic letters which represent each number key on a phone pad) to be displayed. Vanity numbers have been used by businesses in many forms of advertising because they were considered to provide a mnemonic aid to remembering the phone number, and because they may improve brand awareness or conversions.

I believe most directories may not allow vanity numbers to be entered for businesses, and there may be compelling reasons not to use them in online. The classic letter keypads are not available on many mobile phones, and the letters may not work in a number of VoIP services.

Secondary telephone(s). Secondary phone lines really help if you have too many calls to route through a single number/line. Using a secondary phone number in listings where it’s allowed might be a good place to park the vanity version of your main phone number, if you have one and really want to use it. Otherwise, I suggest that you not alternate which number is your primary vs. secondary number in the various directories out there—keep the main number consistent so that aggregators and directories can easily keep the various data provider listings for you compiled into one main listing.

Fax number. Perhaps a feature growing less popular/necessary as internet communications continue to grow, but still useful in some particular business verticals.

Meta descriptions / Directory listing descriptions / Ad description text / Taglines. I’m grouping a number of these together because they’re quite similar—many online directories like DMOZ have only a link to your business site along with a brief text description. In all these cases, it’s important for you to be concise and accurate in describing what’s unique about your business and include one/two main keywords that consumers would be using to find you.

Categories. In many directories, millions of businesses have been automatically assigned to a category. Businesses should check to be sure they’re in the correct categories for their industry, and add on multiple other categories which are appropriate. This ensures that the listing will come up for business type searches as much as possible.

Keywords. Some services now allow one to associate keywords onto the profile. The way to make this work for you is to figure out what words users are using to type into yellow pages or search engines in order to find the type of business that you operate. For instance, if you are listed under an “attorneys” category, you might want to add a keyword for “lawyers.”

Services, products, & brands. For a service oriented business, listing out the specific services that are provided is a must. What are the top few services you offer? Don’t assume that just because you’re categorized in a particular industry, you don’t need to mention the obvious. For instance, a photographer listed under “Wedding Photographers” should state under Services that they “Provide wedding photos, formal bridal portraits, candid shots of wedding parties and rehearsals.” Listing Products & Brands with a business can also help it to come up as more relevant for users’ specific searches.

Specialties & amenities. The specialties & amenities are really important to provide attributes that can differentiate between you and your competitors. Specialties for a lawyer may bring in more clients who have cases for which they’re particularly skilled. Amenities in hotel listings like pools, exercise rooms, free breakfasts, and others can draw in more business than nearly anything and are vital details.

Photos. For accommodations or specialty products businesses, including clear, large enough photos really help consumers in choosing.

Website URL. URLs, of cours, are the vanity phone numbers of the internet space, and the obvious conventional wisdom is that they should be short, descriptive, easy to spell, and contain good keywords. When listing your URL in directories, I suggest that you leave the “WWW” off as long as you’ve made sure the WWW and non-WWW versions of your domain name are functional. Leaving the WWW off the URL makes it shorter and makes the keywords or brand name stand out better. (See also the No-WWW Initiative.)

If you have a URL that you think may not be optimal, did you know that you could register a new one that works better and just aim it at your existing site? If you do that, you’ll want to make one use a 301 redirect to the other so that search engines only index your pages on one main domain name.

Email address. Including an email address with a business listing can be as useful as a phone number, but there are caveats with it. There are apparently quite a lot of businesses which do not keep up with their email in a professional manner, and in these cases, having an email address can actually reduce referrals which might’ve otherwise come in via phone calls. If you list an email address, have it checked at least once per business day and respond to inquiries. If you can’t commit to checking it, just don’t display one.

Payment options. Showing payment options helps unless you’re extremely restrictive about payment types—in which case, it can cause consumers to avoid the business.

Hours of operation. Listing times is quite helpful to everyone who works 8 to 5, but hours of operation should be considered a commitment or a contract which you won’t ever break except on major holidays. There is nothing more irritating than showing up for a business only to find that they’ve closed early or they’re only randomly open.

Logos and icons. Logos or listing icons can be eye-candy for a listings page, and they can attract attention and make a listing seem more professional. Avoid low-quality graphics and vague/weak promotional messages.

Areas served. You’ve already listed your city, so this parameter is where you list alternative or regional names and neighborhoods. “Upper West Side,” “Nob Hill Neighborhood,” and “Serving the Mid-Cities” are some examples.

Year founded & years in business. If your business has been running for two or more years, adding this can enhance consumer trust.

Associations—Minority owned / Chamber member / Religion / Environmental / Professional associations. In most cases, I’d say that listing out various associations typically helps gain new customers and rarely turns them off.

Certifications. Few consumers may know what’s involved in obtaining various certifications, but listing out the ones you have is an indicator of your professionalism and expertise.

Languages. Listing out languages you can support is a no-brainer for getting some particular clientele who need alternate language support.

Professional endorsements & ratings. Few directories provide any option for listing endorsements, but for the ones which do, displaying quotes from major news media, well-known experts, and other recognizable companies can be effective. Quoting positive professional ratings you may have can help convince consumers of your worth and add the perception that your superlatives are not just hollow claims.

User ratings & reviews. While user ratings and reviews may get applied to your profile, you can still influence them to some degree. Rating values have become one of the most important factors for achieving rankings in various local search engines, so you shouldn’t ignore them. Ask your particularly pleased customers to rate your business online in each of the major directories and local search engines. Some rating services allow you to respond to specific complaints or negative statements—do so. If you suspect that a competitor has falsely stacked the deck against you, complain to the company hosting the reviews and request that they look into it. Also, take a very hard look at your own shop and see if there are areas where you need to improve customer service—take criticism from customers seriously and look upon it as an opportunity to learn and improve. A few negative ratings or reviews can eventually become buried by consistently applying fantastic service. Do not try to fraudulently influence ratings by having you or your employees submit reviews, or you could get found out.

Prices. Prices can either be externally applied in a fashion similar to ratings, or some business categories may allow you to enter typical pricing information for your services. Restaurant profiles and other category templates may allow pricing info to be shown as a single value, a range from low to high prices, or as a symbol like one-to-multiple dollar signs. Make sure your prices accurately reflect the typical costs of what most users pay for your services. If a price parameter is allowed for your profile, you should assess whether it is expected or vital to your type of business. I’ve been very frustrated a number of times when viewing Restaurant websites, only to discover online menus with no prices. In a Restaurants category where many of the top listings may have the Prices element present, failure to display the parameter with your listing could result in far fewer customers as people can become disgusted or distrustful at the lack of info.

Following these tips, you should update and expand the data in your business profiles in all the major yellow pages, directories, and local search engines in order to maximize your online presence. Take advantage of the free advertising through all the business profile directories out there, and you’ll start pulling your business ahead of the pack.