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This page gives you hints and tips that allow you to make the most of your Gold membership.

Six Business Categories
Ensure your listing is connected to up to six appropriate categories.
Every category you are listed gives another search term that helps find your business on Google, Yahoo, Bing and The National Pages. Click here for a list of categories or contact us for us to check.

Customisable Tags on your Gold listing
The Gold listing is the advert that displays when somebody searches for one of your business categories in a location near your business.

In your listing there is space (maximum 210 characters) for Search Engine friendly Tags that describe your business services and products. It can also be used for your strapline for added impact.

Tags increase the likelihood of your listing appearing higher in Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, drawing more visitors to your advert. The Tags can be customised for your specific business services.

Please let us know the Tags you want to include on your advert and we'll set them up for you!. 

Updating your Gold Profile check out our Video Tutorial
Check out our video tutorial to see how to update your Profile

Changing images on your Gold Profile
We want to ensure your advert looks the best for you and for us! We recognise most people do not have the design skills in-house to produce professional graphics. If you would like us to change your images just let us know and we'll do it for you (fair use policy applies).

Your business changes and you want to completely change your Profile
No problem. We'll do it for you! We recognise that businesses change and we want to honour our Price-for-Life promise for you.
We will completely redesign and build a new Gold Profile for you (fair use policy applies).

Ensure your Profile has high quality links to landing pages on your website
Visitors (and Search Engines including Google) want to find more detailed information about your products and services.
Ensure the text in your Gold profile has links to your website pages. The text content on the link (known as the anchor text) is important. It is this text content that becomes indexed in Search Engines. Therefore, to improve the Search Engine Optimisation for your website, ensure the anchor text is an expression that visitors may enter in a Search Engine.
For example:

BAD
Click here to see our Carpet Cleaning Services in Oxford

GOOD
For Carpet Cleaning Services in Oxford call us first!

Adjusting the map marker to your exact business location
You can adjust the map marker to your exact location by logging on and dragging the marker.
This helps visitors find the exact position of your premises.

Support for your video(s)
Your Gold Profile can link to your video. We support YouTube and FLV videos (if you already have a video on your website chances are we will be able to implement it to your profile).

A video is an excellent way of articulating your business services which visitors find increasingly useful to decide who to do business with. It gives you a competitive edge. We do not charge more to link to your video. Some customers find connecting to a video tricky - no problem leave it to us.

If you have a video but don't have the web space for it or don't know how to upload it into a streaming video - no problem for a small fee we'll convert it and set it up for you.

Option to disable the map and privacy
For those businesses that do not want customers to visit their premise the map can be disabled. Just contact us and ask for it to be disabled or you can logon and set the Disable Map checkbox on the Map tab.

Our advice is generally not to disable the map. A map implies a larger company prepared to accept visitors which may increase the perception of the size of your business.

The map marker is based on a postcode which typically covers an area comprising from 10 to 50 businesses. Therefore the map will not normally uniquely identify your premises. In rural areas the postcode will normally narrow down the location of your business.

Should further privacy be required and you do not wish to publicly disclose your exact mailing address or location, we are happy to remove the exact address details, for example the number of the house. Please contact us to set this up for you.

The National Pages window stickers
We offer free window stickers for anyone. These draw attention to your Profile on The National Pages which helps visitors find out more about your business. For example the window sticker could be placed in an office, shop or van window.

The National Pages images linking to your Gold Profile
We have two high quality Gold jpg images (circular or rectangular) which contain links to your Gold Profile. These are designed to be placed somewhere on your website (or any website you know) to draw attention to your Profile in The National Pages. This particularly helps Search Engines find more about your business by crawling to (finding) and indexing your Gold Profile.

Most customers place the image on their Contact Us page where space is more readily available and the image delivers good eye-candy.

If you are unsure or unable to add the image to your website we will do it for you at no charge. We will require your website logon details to do this.

Referral Scheme
We offer an excellent referral scheme for Gold customers.

If you refer a friend (or maybe you want a second Gold Profile) who signs up for Gold then we give you a free six month extension to your Gold membership.

A second referral who signs up for Gold gives you another six month extension. So for two referrals who sign up you will receive a free year's membership!

If you refer more than two in the same 24 month membership period who sign up to Gold then we give you 40% commission of their respective Gold sign up fee.

This means, for example, if you referred five of your customers who upgrade to Gold, then you would receive a free year's extension to your membership and you would receive £132. (3 x 40% * £110) assuming they joined at the standard Gold membership rate.

Free Blogging Service of your area of expertise. Get noticed by Google
Blogging is the publication of articles on the internet. When we blog an article on our website we automatically notify over 100 large mainstream blogging sites on the internet.

We will put links in your article to your website and your Gold Profile. This delivers you a very powerful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) benefit. Every time your article is published on other blogging sites, this will increase links to your website helping increase your Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP).

Articles submitted for the blog should be of an informative or authoritative nature, normally in your area of expertise. This implicitly shows readers that you are an expert in your field and helps avoid readers feeling they are being sold to. You are simply informing them something that is to their benefit. This helps engender trust which is a major step to building a relationship which may later lead to sales.

We also publish links to customers blog articles in our newsletter. This is additional FREE advertising for you our Gold customer. For more information about our blogging service please click here.

Free Facebook and twitter advertising
We will publish adverts and post links to your Gold Profile on various Social Media sites like Facebook and twitter. As well as targeting human visitors this increases links to your Profile all helping your SERP for Search Engines.

Statistics
For our Gold customers we provide two statistics every month: The number of times your Gold listing has displayed on the search page (e.g. someone has searched one of your categories in a location)

The number of times a visitor has clicked the listing and displayed your Gold Profile for more information.

These statistics are found by simply logging on with your username and password when you signed up. These will have been emailed to you in the Welcome Email. If you have forgotten your logon details, just contact us or click the forgotten your password link and we'll send them through to your previously registered email address.

The links are full links and not inhibited in any way, this provides a strong link to your website. If you want to know the number of click throughs, most web hosting statistical Memberships (like Google Analytics) will show referrals from the referring website, thenationalpages.co.uk.

Newsletter
We publish an online newsletter at least every month. This is our principal mechanism to keep our customers, and everybody who has met us, up to date with new benefits and features from The National Pages. To ensure the newsletter does not end up in your Spam Folder we ask you to whitelist (accept) all emails sent from thenationalpages.co.uk

Listening to your ideas
Many new features in The National Pages Business Directory and Search Engine have been suggested by our customers and we have implemented them!

One of the benefits of our company compared to other business Search Engine companies is we are able to respond more quickly to good ideas and implement them for your benefit and our visitors.

If you have an idea which improves the advertising we can offer you then please contact us. We are always ready to listen.

Charities - donate tab
We can set up a Donate tab on your Gold Profile which links directly to your donate landing page.

B&B and Hotel Online Reservation system
We offer an online reservation system for B&Bs and Hotels included as part of your Gold Profile.

If your website is not set up to take online bookings then we can easily add this to your Gold Profile and we'll train you how to take online bookings. You set the number of rooms and the room rates. You receive an email when a booking is made and the system automatically lowers the available number of rooms. We charge a small commission on each booking made via the Gold Profile. For an example, search for Hotels in Windermere and click Contact on the Reservations tab on a Gold Profile.

Not got a website?
Your Gold Profile can act as your website! It contains the essential details about your business. If you already have a (www) Domain Name we can link it at no charge to your Gold Profile.

If you don't have a Domain Name then our Golden Link Membership is designed for you. For a very low annual fee of £45+vat we will purchase a professional Domain Name for you, connect it to an email service giving you five professional email addresses and link it to your Gold Profile which acts as your website. At a later date when you have a website then you can still keep the Golden Link service for your Domain Name and emails and we simply reroute the (www) website pointer away from your Gold Profile to your new website.

For example click on this web address: nortonfitzwarrenvillagehall.org.uk

Price-for-Life promise
The price you paid for your Gold Profile is fixed for renewal. It is guaranteed never to go up. This is our loyalty bonus for you.

However, note this requires your continuous membership. If you leave then rejoin then the Gold membership fee will be at the prevailing rate.