Free Australian directories where you can list your website

Published on June 20, 2012 Free Australian directories where you can list your website

Once your site is live, one of the first things you’ll want to do is build exposure to your target audience, and give yourself some visibility in search engines. A scattergun approach is not recommended, as there are hundreds of thousands of directories on the Internet that are either not indexed by search engines, do not get actual human visitors or do not count for your search rankings. Listing in them is just wasting your valuable time.

If you want your website to rank in Australia, it’s not where your hosting is that counts. It’s having a presence in Australia which include referrals and links from quality Australian websites. International authority links are relevant and useful too, but you do need to put some time and effort in to building an Australian presence if you want to get Australian visitors. Where do you start?

Stop looking for the “I can give you 10,000 directory links” type of offers that you see every day on the Internet and dump all of those hundreds of emails originating in Asia offering you the world if you just buy their eBook. Link building is about real marketing – building a real presence in directories and other places where actual people go.

Here are some of the free online business directories in Australia where you can start to build your profile. Try visiting some of these:

• Hotfrog – www.hotfrog.com.au
• Search Frog – https://searchfrog.com.au/
• Truelocal – www.truelocal.com.au
• Google Local – https://business.google.com/locations?hl=en-au
• Yalwa – www.yalwa.com.au
• DLook – www.dlook.com.au
• Web Wombat – www.webwombat.com.au
• Fashion Plazza – www.fashionplaza.com.au
• Start Local – www.startlocal.com.au
• Local Business Guide – www.localbusinessguide.com.au

Beware of the link back request!

When you try to list on some of the smaller directories they might ask you to provide a link back (or reciprocal link) to their site (or worse some third party site). These are an outdated link scheme that will hurt your business more than it will help it. Google for example publicly frown on this type of linking scheme unless it’s directly relevant to your business (e.g., businesses in related industries linking together, links between partner stores, etc.).

Look at the quality of any site that you want to get a link on. Does it look professional? Would you trust the site or does it look like a site that’s been set up just to provide Google benefit to the site’s creator? Links from industries totally unrelated to yours or from low quality blog sites (especially pornography or sex sites) is going to massively hurt your business in the long run and doesn’t look good for a potential customer either if the customer associates your business with the site that’s been linked to you.