Internet Marketing Toronto – Post 8: Directories
In our last post we talked about different forums you could participate in. Today we’re talking about directories!
Directories are a great way to broadcast to the search engines that your “in business” and get referring traffic from the more popular directories.
Before we dive into the list of local Toronto directories I wanted to point out that you should seriously consider submitting to the Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web and Business.com. These three directories carry alot of weight and worth the extra money if you’re serious about increasing your online presence.
Finding directories is the same as finding forums – but with some modified advanced queries.
- [directory toronto site:.ca] Finds toronto based directories and a .ca domain.
The following directories are some that I’ve come across and like to use depending on the situation. When submitting to these or any directories I recommend you create an email forwarder such as “directories@domain.com” as there is a high probability of getting onto some spam lists.
- Business.com
- Yahoo! Directory
- Best of the Web
- Toronto Vegetarian Association
- Downtown Toronto.ca
- Anar.ca – Catering to Persians in Toronto
- Canadian Art Directory
- Yoga Toronto
- Natural Health Care.ca
- ServPro.ca
- CanPages.ca
- MyGTA
With a little searching it’s not hard to come up with quite a few candidate directories. I encourage you to experiment with the queries and get your business listed!
When it comes down to listing your business be sure to have the following information prepared:
- Title: Write a nice short title that fully describes your business and includes your most important keyword(s)
- Description: Write a longer description of your business that expands on the topic(s) in your title. Be sure to user your keyword again.
- Meta Description: A simplified version of your description which would fit into your meta description tag.
- Contact Name: Use your real name, or someone in your company
- Contact Email: Be sure to create an email forwarder for this as you will get this email address on spam lists.
After submitting to the directories be prepared to activate some of the requests by email – so be sure to check your junk mail folders. A few weeks after submitting to the directories have a look at you backlinks again – you’ll begin to see some of these starting to popup!
Up next: Post #9: Press Releases. Find out how to create Press Releases that will help with your local search engine optimization!
