It depends which Internet Yellow Pages directory you are talking about.

The first thing you should know about Internet Yellow Pages costs is that it's a good idea to list in as many online Yellow Pages directories as you can afford. If you are on a budget, some good news is that many of the Yellow Pages directories offer free listings, in addition to their paid Internet Yellow Pages listings.

Indeed, lots of small business owners are focusing online marketing efforts on search engine optimization and buying pay-per-click ads. They are neglecting the Internet Yellow Pages.

According to market research firm comScore, that's a big mistake.

Their research indicates that more than one-third of local search traffic is coming through Internet Yellow Pages sites, versus two-thirds that is coming via the major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo). In other words, one out of every three Internet leads comes from the local directory sites, rather than from organic search results.

comScore ranks the various Internet Yellow Pages players as follows:

Yahoo! Sites - 23.9%
Verizon SuperPages- 20.1%
Google Sites - 12.5%
Yellowpages.com - 12.0%
Time Warner Network - 7.7%
Local.com - 5.9%
InfoSpace Network - 5.1%
Dexonline.com - 4.1%

For this article, we decided to buy Yellow Pages ad listings for one of our portfolio companies, Walker Sands Communications.

Frankly, while the Walker Sands site does very well via organic search, other online marketing media - most notably, local search and Internet Yellow Pages - hadn't been something the marketing team had focused on.

In light of comScore's findings, it seems like we were missing a good bet for getting leads.

Here are the results of our efforts to list our company in the Internet Yellow Pages directories listed above:

• Yahoo! Sites – Check out Getting a Yahoo Local Listing to learn more about what we did to get a local listing in Yahoo and whether we were successful.
• Have to take a little break to work on a few things. We'll get back to this article soon with coverage on getting listed in Verizon SuperPages, Google Local, Yellowpages.com, Time Warner Network, Local.com, InfoSpace Network, and Dexonline.com.