Gail Metcalf, Director of the Valencia California Portal, says “Social networking is very important to tweens, teens and college students. Local city Internet portals are the alternative for busy families to connect and plug themselves into their community to find cultural events, community affairs and local businesses.”
The Valencia California Portal offers local businesses the opportunity to have a web presence and direct access to their community at a fraction of the cost of building, maintaining and promoting a website. The Valencia California Portal at http://www.ValenciaPortal.com is connected to a worldwide network of city portals started in 1999 and built on custom software that continues to grow with the current Internet trends. Whereas new directories and websites can wait up to 12 months to be indexed by the major search engines, the network behind the Valencia California Portal is already indexed. The major search engines visit the network daily and new websites that are linked to the portal are indexed in 2 – 4 days.
“This is a major benefit to businesses in Valencia” says Gail Metcalf. “The search engines will access a new website soon after it’s built but will not index it. New sites are indexed based on website popularity which is calculated by the number of other websites that link to a site. Getting links from other websites takes time and until that time is reached, a website cannot be found on the Internet. It’s like having a billboard in the middle of the Sahara desert. That’s where the Valencia California Portal has the advantage with the worldwide network behind it to attract the search engines and quickly index new business ads, coupons and articles. This means local businesses linking to the portal will be found by residents in the community that are searching for products and services they offer.”
Through Valencia’s portal, local businesses have the opportunity to tell the community about their business through the portal’s array of media sources. Businesses that partner with the Valencia California Portal receive additional benefits to create podcasts, offer coupons and create web power pages with a domain name specific for their business. These media sources are the key to driving traffic to each featured business.
For more information about the Valencia California Portal, visit http://www.ValenciaPortal.com.
