A Local Scranton Directory of Businesses and Professionals that's Actually Local: The Scranton Portal

The "Local" Scranton business directory that pops up in the search engine results when you search for a Scranton business or professional is usually put up by a big advertiser who is trying to cross promote its own paid classified listings. It's not even in the area, as a business. Whether it's a "Yellow Pages" directory, a "scraped" directory (that grabbed all its listings from the Yellow Pages) or some other generic classified site, it's usually useless. If you want to actually find out something about a local business so you can pick up the phone and call them, you're usually out of luck.

Gee, wouldn't it be great to find a local directory that's actually based here in Scranton? Even better, how about a directory that targets the specific things that people in Scranton are looking for? Say, for example, you're looking for local attractions in Scranton. You search for "Scranton Attractions" and, lo and behold, actual Scranton attractions show up in the search engines (like the Zoo at Nay Aug Park and the Houdini Museum), not just a page full of irrelevant stuff and a few lame links to yet another classified directory listing. Would that be useful?

I'm just asking...

Are You "Geo-Located" on Your Website?

You can stuff all the local keywords you want into your Web page that tell people "I'm in Scranton". That's so 20th Century. Haven't you heard of GPS?

There's a nifty tool you can use to narrow yourself down to the exact spot in your parking lot reserved for special customers or clients: Address Fix. Just go there, type in your address (don't worry, your information isn't stored or given away) and bingo! You get a map with a pointer that's very close to the right spot. Zoom in on the map, move the pointer around until it's exactly where you want it and the exact latitude and longitude for that spot is calculated and ready to go as code you can put into the [head] portion of your Web page.

Here's the location of the Scranton Portal:
[meta name="geo.position" content="41.437426; -75.658175" /]
[meta name="geo.placename" content="Scranton, PA" /]
[meta name="geo.region" content="US-PA" /]