Building a Business Directory

This is a follow on from the posts – How I started in SEO, Always Expect The SEO Bubble To Burst and TJ You’re a Genius – Go back and read those 1st.

If you have read the previous post in this SEO story you will have read how I accidentally became an SEO and accidentally created the perfect system for creating Business Directory pages.

All excited about my new page building system, I forgot about my idea of just using the directory as a front to the affiliate stuff I was going to do behind the scenes and started thinking about how I could improve the directory more.

With my basic, self taught, understanding of how I could create pages using the database the next thing I thought was – If I can create a page for all 17,000 business listings can I create a page for all the business categories?

I created another .asp file this time called category.asp and used it to pull categories from the database – /category.asp?strCategory=SEO – It worked just how I expected it to 🙂

I used a similar latest listings .asp file but this time called all-categories.asp which created a link that created the pages for each category and within a few days had a 1,000 category pages indexed and ranking.

I titled these *strCategory* Directory ie.
Accountants Directory
Bookkeepers Directory
SEO Directory
etc.

Within days my traffic was growing and growing

Populating The Category Directories

My self taught coding was working and by category directory pages were ranking well

My next idea was even better

I had found out how to pull individual business listings from the database and found out how to pull business categories from the database – Would I be able to combine the 2 and list all the business in a category on a category page?

All it took was a simple SELECT strBusinessName WHERE strCategory = ‘SEO’
and I could pull all the businesses listed in the SEO category and not only that I could then link from the listing to their individual page which created the perfect navigation system.

Once I had done that I started doing the same for Counties and then towns, again all linking back to the end individual listing pages

The site was now effectively 3 types of directory;
*business category* Directory
*Town* Directory
*County* Directory

With business listed in all 3 with links from all 3 back to the end listing page.

For instance a business called Sim64 SEO who were from Shipston-in-Stour, Warwickshire would be listed in;
The SEO Directory, the Shipston-on-Stour Directory and the Warwickshire Directory which were all well interlinked and all linking back to the Sim64 SEO business listing page.

The whole site was becoming a sitemap with a navigation system that was working brilliantly.

Back to Sim64

Although I was spending a lot of time building my directory site I was still worried that I had all my eggs in the basket with sim64.co.uk so thought again about setting up a few more similar sites and sharing the content about a bit, until I got distracted by a new SEO Competition called V7ndotcom Elursrebmem

THE SEO story continues here – V7ndotcom Elursrebmem Competition

The Sim64 SEO Story

Start with this post
1. How I Started in SEO

The Sim64 SEO Story Continues (start from the bottom post)

Stratford-upon-Avon SEO Company located between Stratford-upon-Avon and Shipston on Stour who provide SEO services to local businesses, tradesmen, sole traders and service providers.

Categories

SEO Services
Technical SEO
Local SEO
Small Business SEO
PPC Management
Postal Address
Honington
Shipston-on-Stour
Warwickshire
CV36 5AB
Contact Details
e: tj@sim64.co.uk
t: 01608 663759
m: 07592 625255
w: https://www.sim64.co.uk/
SEO

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