Business Directories, who do you use and why?

Good post Tomsk, just watched it. So I read it as, it can help, but dont bust a gut over it as its not as important as it used to be.

Ref Trena and the Free Index, yep, definately well worth signing up with.

Hi
im new on here, but have to agree with you totally, if its free then its for me!! thanks for the details on other directories very useful, always great to hear about other peoples genuine experiences of sites

If it's free I'll list as there is nothing to lose, but I don't expect great results from directory listings. If it helps with google rankings great, but I am not sure that paid listings are any better than the free ones.

Is there a list of all the free directories in the UK?

Just a quick thanks for the post. Ill be looking further into this.

here a few more that I am trying out but can't post them on here as I am few posts short

I do not get this FREE mentality, I may be playing devils advocate here, but if you list on a free site you are A, filling up their pages and doing their content and SEO work for them and B, are surrounded by hundreds of others in the same industry, it becomes a lottery.

I did used to list on Freebies, but wont now, any remaining ones can just fizzle out, if your not premium, your customers will see it.

If you are just doing it for a few links here and there, find other ways.

Think of this next time you find a new free listing site:

If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got!

CHANGE!

Edit: Just adding to this, if you had a spare budget of

I think our Kips having a bit of a rant

Do have to disagree though, the free route does actually work in some cases.

To give an example, go to google and type in northampton county court

Round about 4th entry down should be a My Local Services one. Now this is a free listing, and I can tell you it gets thousands of pageviews. So in this case it works. Just in the same way as it does with the likes of FreeIndex and many others.

Using our model, we would upsell to a customer, as the free listing has minimal SEO value, with no weblink back to the customers site. But in this particular case, no one really cares, as 90% of people just want the phone number or address, which is displayed, and the court aren't interested in advertising their web link

But it does show that a free listing is just as capable of generating pageviews, its the chance to convert into sales, via advert wording and web links that suffers.

But when it comes to "list on 100 free directories" I do agree with Kip, and spreading your business over 100's of free web directories, which is normally a page of links from a script driven directoiry will offer you little to no value, and could well cause you problems. Do you want to be associated with dodgy sites displayed on the same page as you!

Sorry Kip I also disagree with you about listing in directories.
A free listing in a quality directory is worth the effort putting it in. I am personally seeing good results from free listings in Google and my site was only launched at the beginning of this month. Without the directory listings, my site would not be climbing like it is.

However, I do agree that other methods need to be used too. Forums, blogs and news articles on my own site are also starting to make headway too.

But don't dismiss the quality directories......

Out of curiosity, what about your own directory UKBN?

"This free directory from UKBN, has been built solely to increase the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your website."

Or are you looking to reposition this away from the freemium model?

Not heard any mention about wiki style directories such as brownbook and aboutus, they let you create a business page with all your information and links rather than just a basic text listing. You can also invite customers to review you etc.

I've listed in these and most of the mentioned directories but I'm not seeing much traffic from any of them at the minute. What do you guys think?