The first thing I do every morning when I get up is check the access analytics for my own company's website and those of our clients.
That said, the points I need to check are just the number of visits, the number of PVs (page views, i.e. how many pages were viewed), plus one or two checkpoints I've decided on in advance for each site. So it's nothing major—usually it takes only about five minutes.

And this morning, when I looked at the analytics report as usual, the number of visits and visitors to our website was several tens of percent higher than normal.
You could even call it a sudden surge.
What's more, the PVs on my own blog posts—Odagiri here—had shot up remarkably...

"Why has it increased this much?"

When I looked into it... the reason was that my profile had been published on [Hamamatsu SpeciaLIST], where I recently registered as a specialist.
Next to my profile there's a link to our company website.
What surprised me was that on the top page, under [Latest Blog Posts from Specialists], my article titles were listed one after another!

"So that's what it was." That explained it.

Apparently the profiles of the registered specialists, including mine, had been published the day before. And as it happened, I was the only member registered at that point who writes a blog, so I effectively monopolized the latest-posts list on the top page, and the links there brought in the traffic.

Of course, this is a huge plus for me in terms of attracting customers! There's no way I could feel bad about it.
Many thanks to Hama-Spe—or rather, to the Hamamatsu Chamber of Commerce and Industry—for including a self-styled "specialist" like me among such a wonderful group of experts. m(__)m

The benefits of registering with [Hamamatsu SpeciaLIST]

That came out sounding a bit like flattery (lol). From here, let me introduce Hamamatsu SpeciaLIST properly. Hamamatsu SpeciaLIST (http://www.hamaspe.jp/ : hereafter abbreviated as Hama-Spe) is, as the name suggests, a matching site for specialists, starting with licensed professionals.

Specialists active mainly in Hamamatsu City—tax accountants, labor and social security attorneys, lawyers and so on—can register. Incidentally, I was able to register because I hold the IT Coordinator qualification, an IT consulting credential.
So what are the benefits of registering here?

Someone who sees your listing might consult you and become a client.
Of course you can expect that kind of visible effect, but as a small-time IT Coordinator, I'd like to point out one benefit you're sure to gain when viewed from the perspective of attracting customers online.

It works as SEO through link effects

When you register your profile, you're asked to enter your website address.
That means a link is placed in your profile section when it's published.
This link can be expected to have an SEO effect—in other words, to help raise your search ranking.

For example, suppose you're a tax accountant or certified public accountant.

"Hamamatsu City accounting firm"
"Hamamatsu City tax consultation"

If your website appeared at the top when someone searched with phrases like these, you'd surely attract a lot of customers, right?
That said, your competitors are thinking exactly the same thing. So it's not so easy to reach number one or two. In an industry with many rivals, even breaking into the top 10 shown on the first page is no simple matter.

That's why everyone takes various measures. That's SEO (search ranking optimization).
By registering with Hama-Spe and getting a link, you can expect it to work as one element of your SEO.
Well, not to the point where it dramatically boosts your ranking on its own, of course...

Do external links still work today?

From here on it gets a bit technical. Feel free to skip it if you're not interested.

If you're interested in SEO, or have worked on it in the past, you may be thinking:
"Hold on, I heard external links don't work anymore. Won't my ranking drop because of a penalty?"
...Don't worry. Links from Hama-Spe certainly won't incur a penalty, and I believe they do have a fair amount of effect.

SEO can be broadly divided into
*On-page measures: steps taken to enrich the content of your website
*Off-page measures: steps taken to get other websites to link to you
these two types.

Google evaluates the content of each website (Yahoo! uses Google's search function as is, so the results are the same) and decides the display order from the highest-rated down.
How it evaluates is not made public, so nobody outside Google knows. However, it's said there are close to 200 evaluation factors.

Google today is said to weight its evaluation as
[On-page measures] > [Off-page measures]

Until a few years ago it was
[On-page measures]

Why did the evaluation method change? The answer is that off-page measures can be gamed.
A link from an external site means the linked page is worth looking at. Therefore a website with many links is a good site.
That was the rationale.
However, businesses appeared that exploited this by buying and selling links for money.
Sites with no value whatsoever to users ended up at the top of the search results through the power of money.

For Google, whose role is to provide users with valuable information, this couldn't be overlooked.
So it drastically changed its evaluation criteria.

The foundation of the criteria is to evaluate the content of the website itself.
The weight given to external links was reduced. Furthermore, websites with lots of meaningless links may be gaming the system, so their rankings themselves are lowered.

Something along those lines.
It's fair to say that trend continues today.

In other words, good external links still have an effect, even if not as much as before.
The thing is, what exactly defines a [good link] versus a [bad link]? It's a fact that this has become hard for ordinary people to judge. That's probably why people tend to think "external links don't work and will get you penalized."

This has gotten long. Let me sum up roughly.
To get straight to the point, Hama-Spe links are [good links]. No doubt about it.
That's because links from sites run by public organizations are regarded as having passed a strict human review (and in fact they have). So they're worthy of evaluation.

What's more, if you look at the source, the link attributeis not present. That's good too.
I'll skip the reason since it's rather technical.

So... I've gone on at length from a search engine perspective, but needless to say, the biggest benefit is simply being listed alongside all these distinguished specialists, which in itself is great branding for you.