Improving Huffs Listing visibility

I have been focused on bringing more visibility and clarity to the listings on Huffs List Directory of Professional Businesspeople. Here are a few suggestions that help optimize the listing's online search engine visibility.

1. Customize your Meta Description to include the highlights of what you offer. Adding your city/state/country also helps your search visibility. You will find the form to do this in My Meta Data. There is a limit of 150 characters, which is the optimal maximum length displayed in search engine results. Without this, your description defaults to a list of your keywords (the services that you provide).

2. Add the metropolitan areas in which you do business. This allows potential customers to filter by metropolitan area and find you. You can do this in My Listing under Metro Areas.

3. Send an email requesting a testimonial to you best customers in My Testimonials. This email includes a link to a landing page where your customer can write a short testimonial for you. These testimonials do not appear on your GO LIVE listing until you have personally approved them. We request that you limit the number of testimonials to one per satisfied customer. Only one testimonial is randomly shown on your GO LIVE listing with a link to more.

Still finding holes.

I run site:huffslist.com on Google and keep getting pages that should not be there. Today, I believe I discovered where the hole is.

On the page where I list what I call subcategories (keywords and phrases), which are under the main professional fields (i.e., accounting, sales and marketing, pet services), I discovered that I was not blocking spiders from following the embedded links to my master query control page. So I was getting pages indexed like this: huffslist.com/CF_LISTING_QUERIES.cfm?searchby=subcategory&scatid=217.

These indexed pages make no sense and really add lots of duplicate pages indexed. I have now added rel="nofollow" to all of these links. Hopefully this will plug up this hole.

The Adventure continues with Technorati

I'm trying to get this new blog listed on Technorati. That's not happening very easily. I first have to claim it, which I thought I did by providing my login to the blog. I then tried to add a 250 character description of the blog, but the form is not working properly and gave me no enter button. I also tried uploading a photo of me, which of course didn't upload. It's the same photo that I used on Facebook, etc.

Is it me? Is it my karma? I guess I'll wait and try again later.

Hopefully HuffsList.com works better and is not so confusing.

The Adventure of Creating Huffs List

Yesterday, I set up and tested the Huffs List site map using the free tool on www.xml-sitemaps.com. The process took me a couple of trials because I had links showing up that did not properly show the page content. My goal is that I have no duplicate links, meta titles and descriptions being indexed by the search engines. I believe that I've finally achieved that goal. YEAH!

So now, each professional individual's listing and each category of services will be indexed, yet indexed only once. I also added the www.xml-sitemaps.com generated site map to the site along with sitemap.xml and ror.xml. And I registered the sitemap.xml with Google.

Furthermore, I repaired an issue with the site's meta data. Duh. I had set up meta titles, descriptions and keywords for all of the support pages (i.e., FAQ, terms and conditions, copyright) and did not have the coding right for the correct meta data to appear on the right page. Everything was defaulting to the main meta data. That's fixed now so each page will be indexed properly.

Now all I have to do is wait for the site to be re-indexed to see the results of my labors.

Welcome to the Huffs List Professionals Directory Blog

WOW! It's new. It's easy to use. Web Visibility!

Are you a professional, consultant, freelancer, and/or expert who is looking to promote yourself online? Millions of searches are done daily for services just like the ones you offer. Huffs List is all about improving your visibility on the web so prospective customers will find you by the services that you provide.

If you have a web site and are not happy with its traffic results, you may already know how expensive and difficult it is to get traffic. Good web visibility - meaning traffic - is all about search engine optimization, which is where Huffs List excels.

HuffsList.com is fully optimized for search engines to promote our advertisers - independent business professionals like you - by their services.

Start HERE!

A Huffs Listing is not:

- A social network where potential customers find you only through friends and groups; and find what services you provide only by first finding you.

A Huffs Listing is:

- A search-friendly web page that advertises you and your business by the services you provide.

- A portal through which viewers connect with YOU, link to your web site(s), find out about you, and even download your literature.

- An inexpensive and effective way to advertise yourself by the services that you provide.

Check our beta site right now. Don't wait. The sooner you sign up, the sooner you will put us to work improving your online visibility.