Companies feel left out of the loop if they don't run Yellow Pages listings, which all agree are expensive to the extreme. The huge stack of paper Yellow Pages arrives annually at an apartment building and they are promptly used as bookends or something on which to mount a hamster's cage. Many go straight to the trash because more and more people own a computer. Type in what's needed on a search bar and millions of results come up. It's assumed that the most relevant and highest quality results will be in the top five search engine ranking positions (SERPs) so these sites are clicked. The sophistication of Google and Yahoo can't be matched by private entities hoping to take a slice of the ad revenue by offering listings in the format of the now-defunct Zip 411 and Red Toronto companies. In an attempt to propagate the client list and put a different face on the directory for the sake of retaining existing file contracts, several of the failed companies have been retrieved from the trash bin and recycled into ZipLocal – a misnomer in that it plans to operate nationally.

In the queries between businesses, no searches would be performed by one company looking for another's industrial wares or services by using such a directory, they would quickly Google it. The consumer is the end user, and the ones with computers would head for the search engines as well. Therefore, the main activity revolving around search directories structured like ZipLocal is the sheer acquisition of ad revenue from business into the pockets of the many search directories and online phone books. This is done by telemarketing teams who expound the value of inclusion to unsuspecting business owners, telling them of the gigantic increase in business this would produce.

Anyone in the field of SEO will know the reason that standard search directories exist: they form a network of links to make websites competitive in the mad scramble for position on the major search engines. Webmasters write descriptions of the site content using a revolving system of about eight titles and six or seven short and long descriptions. These are written to reflect embedded text and metatags (key phrases) done in pairs. They are submitted to free directories in the proper categories so that a link is established to that directory. There are hundreds of thousands of list directories performing the vital task of improving the SERPs of those who are approved. They in turn hope to improve their rankings by requesting a reciprocal link. Some require micro-donations or offer premium listings for larger amounts. If you are performing SEO, don't bother with paying or providing reciprocal links (they don't help your ranking at all, and in fact can degrade your link quality if they have a low Google Page Rank).

By optimizing the site in this manner, the organic ranking for random searches is not temporary, at least in terms of the directories, so that work will only have to be done once. Several other factors come into play, the most important of which is changing the site content. In the past two years, Google has changed so much that it actually gets "bored" when the spiders crawl the site and keep coming back with the same results. It prefers to select sites that have new content or sites that establish new trends. The other search engines follow the leader so to speak. The companies hoping to draw business from the Internet are wiser to spend their advertising budget on maintaining a proper online presence with a custom website and hiring an SEO service. Successful websites have to be done properly; Google bots can't read through frames or templates. They can't read JavaScript, Flash, or graphics. The site is chosen from the HTML content alone, at least for the moment. There is talk of future evolution where images will be assessed as well as content, and websites will have to adapt if search elements within the site are not balanced. Working a site into the search engines will bring in the business for those who look ahead. The online Yellow Pages types of directories (which are sadly incomplete since inclusion is voluntarily paid for) are outdated in concept, and can never compete with the search engines. Zip directories are not as fast as they sound…they are only there to make a quick buck from the ill-advised.