The St Albans District Business Directory is a new online venture by the St Albans Enterprise Agency (STANTA), St Albans District Chamber of Commerce, St Albans Council for the Voluntary Services (CVS) and the St Albans City and District Council, supported with funding from the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) and provided by The Disc Directory.

For individuals and businesses
It will help you find good local businesses for whatever you require – so it will help boost the local economy, by keeping money circulating in the district. It will also help you find businesses that have been recommended by other local users. But it aims to include every business – of whatever sort – in the district, and for free.

For businesses
A basic entry is still absolutely free. But there are opportunities to upgrade your listing and to use recommendation and referral cards to win business for you. Much more than just a business directory, it uses technology which allows feedback so that users can see which businesses are recommended. And further:

it feeds positive feedback automatically into your own social media accounts i.e. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
it has an RSS feed so that you can include your recommendations on your own website
it will give you impartial recommendations through a third party website
it will improve your search engine rankings

So without any work you can get your testimonials out where your potential clients can see them. www.thediscdirectory.co.uk has more than 2million pages indexed by Google (third most recognised after Yell and ThomsonLocal), and therefore search engine optimisation will be improved both by being on the directory and by the social media links.

St Albans District Council last published a hard copy business directory in 2005, and since then has wanted to reintroduce the idea in an on-line system – helping to encourage individuals and businesses to do business with companies in the district. The LSP provided the opportunity to fund this. By linking the four organisations in this project, we hope to involve more local businesses with each other, the Chamber and the community, whilst helping them to promote their businesses successfully – and to help local people find the best of local products and services.

Helping everyone find recommended businesses......

					Funded by