Do Company Profiles Help My SEO Efforts?

There are tons of sites that purport to be directories of businesses and many of them do allow you to create a company profile. Profiles that are searchable by industry will help you when people search on those sites for your industry, but any value to your SEO campaign (specifically, here, it would be gaining links back to your own web site) depends on the links and kinds of links you get from a particular service.

When the links are created by their internal systems - which is usually the case - you're asked to supply the URL for your site and then the system that builds the profile for your company turns your title (or some other portion of your listing) into a link. Does it go to your site? Does it go to your company contact information also on the host site?

Is the "no-follow" attribute added to links that DO point to your actual site? Can your control the use of "keywords" in the actual link text?

Take a look at the company profile for Wells Fargo on Yahoo Finance. And the one for WF on the San Francisco Business Times. While the value of a listing with either of these two, fine directories of services is considerable, the SEO value of these listings is nil. Links back to Wells' own site are not present.

Simple "Directories", those that take URL submissions, often use your title as a link to your site. If your keywords are in your title, you can get some link juice from this approach. However, those same directories - if they offer company profile space - will link your title to yourprofie on their site - not yours.

Where Can I get Good Links to My Site?

eQuinox9-com Business Resources is a new business resources web site. Unlike the major business directories, there is no charge to load up your company information, no charge to search and view company profiles, and few limits on how your create links back to your own site.

Industry Profiles, Company Profiles, personal biographies, articles, podcasts and more are all User submitted content with almost total user autonomoy. Quality of content is guarded by a flag system - users can flag an item as inappropriate. Administrators determine when and where you've crossed the line between providing information about your company and spamming with their tools.

An extensive Terms of Service aggreement (see it here: eQuinox-9.com TOS) might seem daunting at first. The low down is they allow you to create links - expect you to create links - and ask that you do so tastefully while providing information that will hold value for eQuinox-9.com readers. 

We can hope more sites will allow this kind of freedom, though I imagine the drain on administrators might lead to some changes in their approach over time.