Finda as a presell page

Aug 20, 2008

People often get obsessed by links, and get all wound up about whether a link is nofollowed or not.

The truth is, many links have 'secondary' benefits that are far more powerful than a little trickle of link juice.

This morning's example is how to get your page on finda ranking in the top 10, instead of somebody else's page on finda. While finda only lists New Zealand businesses, this concept applies everywhere.

Update March 2009

I'm told that finda have been having a fair bit of trouble with people spamming the business name, and are now actively checking to make sure the business name is actually the business name. With this in mind, the rest of this article is no longer relevant to finda and will likely get your listing denied - however the advice still applies for other directories and sites where you get a full-page listing.

Presell pages

A presell page is a page about your business, hosted on somebody else's website. More often than not, you also get a link, but that's not the main purpose of the presell page. Ideally, the presell page should rank for the same phrases you are targeting for your site, so that there are effectively 2 results for your business in the top 10 Google results.
A presell page is not the same as a directory (which lists all sites on one page). The distinction is that you get your own page, and the domain is powerful enough to get these sub-pages ranking. Finda is one such website.

Does finda rank?

finda is like a poor man's Wikipedia - in the NZ market, it's generally ranking well for a lot of different niches. Sometimes, your competitor's finda listing is ranking in the top 10, so you have extra work to do to displace their listing before yours will show. You need to tell Google that your page on finda is more relevant to the search phrase than all the other finda listings.

Optimising finda

So here's where we apply basic SEO 101 techniques to your finda listing. The key here, as always, is to be tasteful and not overdo it. There are really only 2 things to optimise on the finda listing, and that's the title and the business description.

So when you enter the title for your business, don't just enter 'John Smith Limited', which is the obvious choice. Remember, this text becomes the page title, and usually the business name is a crap choice. Take a little license and enter 'John Smith Auckland Plumbing'.
Don't take too much license and enter 'John Smith Auckland Plumbing, Drain unblocking, Hot water installations' as this is pushing the boundaries, is disrespectful to finda, and will likely get your listing denied anyway.

Next, make sure your business description includes 'Auckland plumbing' once, or preferably twice if you can do so without ruining the readability of the description.

Next, enter the remaining fields as thoroughly as possible - enter all street addresses, phone numbers and other details so your listing is as good as it can be.

Links

From here, you might want to sit back for a week or so and see if your finda listing page starts ranking in Google. It probably won't, so here's where you do something that your competition isn't doing - point some links at your finda listing.
These links can come from anywhere really, but preferably not from the domain that you are promoting (so avoiding it being a reciprocal link).

In most cases, 2 or 3 links from reasonable sources is enough to tell Google that your finda page is the most relevant on their site for the chosen phrase (combined with the on-page factors above).

Schwing

Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes your business name already contains those lovely keywords, and sometimes you just can't shoehorn them in there. Having additional entry points to your site is a very desireable thing to have, and finda wins too by scoring some free links to their domain (I don't imagine they would be complaining about you helping to get their site ranking better).

Of course, presell pages can be used in lots of places, not just finda. Think a little broader when you are doing link building for your site, and you can easily spot these opportunities.

Consider this another tool in your ever-growing bag of SEO techniques.

Tags: link building links seo presell pages finda