You all know that the "Big 5" as I like to call them (your site, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) are the websites you need to get listed on, in one way or another. Your own website–aka your "money site"–is the key to all of your online endeavors. It is the hub of a hub and spoke arrangement.

Anything and everything should lead back to your money site.

This includes so-called "local directories."

Here's a list of the top-tier local internet directories:

• Merchant Circle
• Better Business Bureau
• Angie's List
• Hot Frog
• Patch
• Insider Pages
• Yellow Pages, if possible
• Google Places (a biggie–the biggest of the big, in fact)
• Yahoo Local (another biggie)
• Bing Local (another biggie)
• Yelp
• Best of the Web

Now, most of these are "free" as in if you do it yourself, you can list your business without paying a fee to the owner of the website. Merchant Circle is free for a basic listing and I think you can pay for an upgrade. Hot Frog, Google Places, Yahoo and Bing local–all free.

Though, of course, internet marketing consultants like me do in fact earn money by setting up these pages for you. We trade our time for your money.

Otherwise, you'd have to expend your valuable time filling out forms in a probably less-than-optimal fashion.

I suggest that you get your business listed on most–if not all–of these sites. Make sure that your data is consistent across each of them, meaning that your business name, address, telephone number, and description are the same on each site.

Google Places, for one, looks across multiple sites for this data and if it sees discrepancies in the data, its aggregation algorithm goes haywire. You wind up with a Google Places listing that isn't as powerful as it could be if your data were consistent across all of these websites.

Local directories are about the only places where you want your content to be truly "duplicate."