Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Claim Game: Why You Should Take Ownership of Your Orphaned Business Listing

Posted on by citycliq

Every year, millions of lonely, unloved businesses go unclaimed all across the web. They are alone, frightened, abandoned, and usually just include generic, basic info such as phone number and address. They are forgotten and forced to live out their eternity in the wastelands of the internet. But you can save them. You can show them that there is indeed someone out there that cares enough to update their tattered, outdated information. Someone that cares enough to decorate their meek existence with colorful and informative pictures. If you show love to your unclaimed business listing, it will return that love ten-fold.Orphaned Business Listings

Interested? Great! Now let’s get started.

Where do I begin?
This is the part that takes a little bit of detective work. Luckily, you have the Sherlock Holmeses of the internet at your disposal (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). First off, you have to find out where these unclaimed listings are hiding. To do this, simply type your business name into the search engine of your choice and let the magic begin. In a few moments, you should have a pretty substantial list of places that your business is appearing online. If you have a personal website or a CityCliq site (shameless plug) you should see those pages towards the top of the list. You should also see a lot of websites that you may or may not have heard of before that are also listing information about your business. These are the ones that you should be after. These are the orphaned listings that are in desperate need of claiming.

Why should I care about claiming my orphaned listings?
 More often than not, orphaned listings are confused. They need guidance and usually contain inaccurate information. Everything from wrong phone numbers to old addresses can appear on these unclaimed pages but luckily, you as the business owner have the opportunity to step in and make things right. Almost every directory-style page that provides generic business information gives the owner the opportunity to claim and edit their business on that page. Once you have claimed your business, you can usually edit everything from addresses, phone numbers, custom website addresses (backlinks anyone?) and sometimes even add photos. The listing will be much happier and so will any customers that happen to land on that page when researching your business.

Not only will customers be privy to accurate and current information, they will see your business as being more established and credible than your competitor, who probably hasn’t taken the time to seek out and claim his or her orphaned listing. Essentially, by taking the time to claim and edit your business’ information on as many websites as you can, you create automatic credibility with any consumer that happens to find you on one of those sites. Even if it is a site that you have never heard of, chances are that there are thousands of people who frequent that site everyday.

Claiming Your Business Listing Will Make You MoneyAlright, I’ve claimed my listings…now what?
 If you have truly become ‘Daddy Warbucks’ and claimed as many of your orphaned business listings as you can find, you can sit back and enjoy the benefits of your hard work. Not only have you saved these little listings from a life of mediocrity, you have given your potential customers a much better chance of getting a hold of you and have presented your business in a much more appealing light. If a website sticks out in your mind as being particularly awesome, you can even link to it from your blog, personal website, or email signature and spread the word about its greatness. I’m sure the listing on that page would enjoy the attention.

Keeping your business information consistent across the entire web is no easy task. Don’t let it overwhelm you though. Just take a step back and approach it methodically, one site at a time. Before you know it, you will have a whole slew of happy, claimed listings, all driving traffic to your business.

Feel free to comment and share some of your favorite/least favorite directory-style listing sites or maybe some of the strangest places that you have seen your business information pop up.

Beauty and the Backlink

Posted on by citycliq

It takes a lot to get noticed on the web.  Your site could be the prettiest, the wittiest, or the coolest ever created, but with over 230 million others out there, it’s easier than ever to get lost in the clutter. One thing that can put a nice gust of wind in your sails and blow you past your competition is an armada of quality backlinks.

What the heck is a backlink?
A backlink is simply an inbound link that brings someone from a website to your website.  The number and quality of these links is a large contributing factor as to where you will show up in search engines such as Google.  In Google’s mind, if a lot of people want to link to your site, then your site must be pretty darn good.  As a reward for making a good website that other good websites want to link to, Google will place you higher up in search engine results and people will have a much better chance of finding you over the other 230 million websites currently infesting the inter-webs.

Quality LinksQuality Links

More is not always better…
Notice that one of the key words that I used above was QUALITY.  Google recognizes quality backlinks from reputable sources.  For example, a link that comes from Cnet.com would weigh much heavier on your page ranking than a link coming from Joe Blow’s Crazy Cat page that was created last month.  With that being said, stay as far away from Link Farms as you can.  These are basically services that offer you tons of backlinks, except the links are from sources that are about as far away from quality as you can get.  The usual pitch is, “We can get you thousands of links…” but what they don’t tell you is that those links will be from pages similar to Joe Blow’s Crazy Cat page.

Quality Backlink Site Content

Link farms were big in the late 90s, but as Google started its conquest for Internet (and possibly world) domination, link farms quickly started gaining a reputation as “black-hat” style SEO practice (which means search engines don’t like it).  By participating in these types of activities, your ranking in search engines will usually be compromised and your site may even be blacklisted itself if you do things like link-exchanging with known malicious or seedy sites.
Rule of thumb, the internet is not Mesopotamia, it’s not a fertile delta, therefore anything with Farm and the Internet in the same sentence should be avoided, and that includes Farmville (sorry, Facebook fans).

Quality BacklinksImage from Tech It Easy

So how do I get QUALITY backlinks?
Well, it’s not easy.  People need to find your content relevant enough to want to link to it and, most importantly, you have to get the word out that your content even exists.  One of the best ways to do that is to get involved in your online community.  Interact with people via Twitter, Facebook and other blogs that are relevant to your business.  Get involved in discussions on other popular sites and create a profile on there, but make your profile name a clickable link back to your site.  That way, when you comment with relevant information that moves the discussion forward in said blog or site, you help build your site’s “brand” and become a potentially quotable source.

Be careful not to spam the comment sections, though, as that will most likely turn off your potential new friends before they even get a chance to know you.  Interact with other people professionally, act like a real person instead of a robot, and other commenters and publishers will be much more inclined to check out and possibly link to your site.

There’s no question that the benefits of getting good, quality backlinks greatly outweigh the labor and sweat it takes to get them. Feel free to comment with your backlink experiences (good & bad, we don’t discriminate) and share some other strategies that may have worked for you and your business.

Using Visual Website Optimizer to Test Headlines

Posted on by citycliq

The fine folks at Visual Website Optimizer just published a case study about how we recently used their service to test headline messages on our homepage.

Visual Website Optimizer CityCliq Screengrab

If you’re a website owner interested in doing some split testing, we strongly recommend checking out VWO. It’s incredibly easy to use and delivers very useful data. In our case, we tested a few variations on our homepage tagline and found that the simpler, more direct copy led to a tremendous increase in clickthroughs to the plans page. Testing messages is just one way that we can make CityCliq better for business owners and we plan on doing much more in the future.