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.

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.