1. Optimize your site with certain keyword, product, prospective customers, and geography. Think of it as if you where balancing a chair, leaving one of these “legs” off would cause the chair to topple over. These four things are the base of local SEO.

2. Make sure your website is designed in such a way that is congruent with your product, your customer’s profile, and the culture of the location you do business.

3. Before you worry about getting ranked, get your website indexed with local search engines, especially the big three: Google local, Yahoo local, and Bing. After all, you can’t start getting ranked until your actually indexed with them!

4. Target your local community with specific key words. You can do this by using keyword permutations or combinations of geographic places you are targeting. For example, if you operate your business in Sydney, insert the place name in the keyword phrase, such as: “real estate property in Sydney.”

5. List your site in local directories. As long as the directory is relevant to what your selling, put your site links in as many local directories as you can find.

Using local SEO may seem horribly complicated, but with a little understanding it can actually be very simple. It’s important to remember that there is no magic formula to use for local SEO. However, there are certain key points you can follow in order to significantly increase your website’s rankings locally with search engines. This is called local search engine optimization, and can really affect how and where your site is ranked when it comes to search page results.

In the last few years, SEO has become the all-important buzzword for business-minded webmasters. Figuring out how to guarantee top search rankings is all important. In fact, in the past, many used unethical black had methods to make sure they were at the top. They’d put spam keywords throughout their web content to get noticed, even though this got them many people who weren’t interested in their products or services. Luckily, these days are gone. Google and the other big search engines have figured out how to prevent this kind of misconduct.

As technology has improved, SEO is still a hot buzzword. However, with the search for more relevant content, it doesn’t stop there. The really important term now is “Local SEO.” Not only does local SEO allow small business owners to use keywords to get to their target market, it also allows people to find them geographically. This has been confusing to many because they treated global SEO and local search engine optimization as the same thing, many entering the market just to take advantage of the buzz. You could find many resources that offered things like “Secret Local SEO Guide and Advice Books,” but this was really plagiarized information stolen from obscure websites. Luckily, there are excellent search engine optimization books out there, but they don’t come cheap. So to help you continue to be a relevant and successful small business owner, here is a checklist guide you can use to let you take advantage of local search engine optimization:

Next, make sure that you include a target keyword in your business name. A creative name may look clever, but putting a keyword in your business name will increase your ranking and bring more traffic to your website. Here’s an example. Say that are a dentist in the town of Parramatta. Put the words “dentist” and “Parramatta” in your domain name or in the website’s title. Getting the geographic keyword and most likely to be searched keyword here will really make it easier for your target geographic to find you on the web. It may seem awkward, but it can really make a difference as a powerful local SEO strategy.

Thirdly, another great local SEO strategy is to include a contact page on your site, or make your physical information visible in some other way. This includes your office or business address, phone number, and area code. Visibility and transparency are a key component in creating trust for new visitors to contact you and old ones to become repeat customers. Either have a link for this information, or include it in your header footer, as long as it is always visible. In fact, you could even include information on nearby landmarks to help your customers get to you easier. Another great option is to register in Google’s local maps by putting your business on the virtual map. You local SEO expert will know how to do this, so ask them.

Remember, always choose quality over popularity. Using local SEO is not just about attracting anybody to your site; it’s about finding those people who are actually interested in your product or service. What keyword would a client probably type in if they were looking for your product or service? If you own a bookshop, it could be “bookstore.” If you provide a gardening service, it could be “landscaper.” Put yourself in the shoes of your customers; what would they look for?

Speaking of walking in other’s shoes, make sure you know both the stats of your prospective clients and your competition. Ask these questions: What’s the typical age and status of your competitor’s clients? What’s the common gender of people who visit their sites? What income bracket are their consumers in? You could even study how your competitors design their websites. If most of them use white, then you could too, but put a twist like red or yellow to make your site more interesting and attractive. Learn from their mistakes and triumphs.

Remember, local SEO is a different animal than Global SEO. You’re not just shooting into the dark, you are carefully targeting by using a sound strategy. Reaching your local community can be the key to increase your sales significantly, or even be vital to staying in business.

For local businesses, local SEO, or search engine optimization, is the path you need to take to reach your local market. When creating your website, you must design them for local SEO in order to get noticed by local search engines. After all, global searches would be useless to most local businesses, and the search algorithms for global and local are very different. Local websites must be optimized for the things major search engines are looking for in a local category. With local SEO, you need to really consider targeting a smaller and geographically relevant audience in order to rank high in local search engines such as Google, Yahoo local, and Bing.

For brick-and-mortar businesses, with a real, physical location, reaching local customers is critical. If you have a dry cleaning business in Philadelphia, reaching people in Hong Kong is useless. You need to target those who can physically reach your location. SEO is vital for this. If a business owner’s website is not designed locally, then it is much more difficult to reach local consumers. Here are some tips on how to start designing your own website with local SEO.

Your first step is to make sure your website has active optimization. If you don’t know what this means then you should hire a local SEO expert to do this for you. Either way, be sure to include your local information in the domain, the page title, or the body of the content. If you don’t do this, you may wonder why you are getting no leads with your SEO campaign, so don’t overlook this. Or, if you hired someone, make sure that you are on the same page. Make sure they understand that your goal is to reach local clientele.

Business websites and particularly the website of small local businesses are usually in not very competitive online markets. Whereas, an ecommerce or an affiliate website can have thousands, if not, millions of competing pages for their main keywords, small business sites usually have less than 100,000 competitors. That might seems like a big number at first but in actuality, the competing pages are usually less than 10. Here is a how you to easily outrank most of the competition in your local market:

Optimize the titles of the pages you are trying to rank higher up in the search engines!

It might sound like a very simple and obvious thing and in reality it is, but you will be surprised at how many people, most probably including your competition, get them wrong. The title of your page is, undoubtedly, the most important factor when it comes to on-page seo and that is why making it “optimized” can give you an almost instant boost in rankings. Most small businesses have their company name in the title of their home page, some of them even leave their titles as “page title” or “untitled” or even “here is where the title goes”. Just type in your main keyword in Google and look at your direct competition, for sure you will find at least a couple of examples with such titles. In addition, some of the competing pages for your local market are big directories such as the yellow pages or yelp and for branding purposes they always put their website or company name in the titles of their pages.

All this is good news for you because once you are aware of the importance of title tags you can change them and dominate your competition. The best strategy is to put in the title of your home page (assuming you are trying to rank your home page) 2 or 3 of your main keywords separating them with a dash. But be careful, don’t’ “stuff” your title with the same keywords or you will be penalized by the search engines for that. You need t o be creative here so, for example, if you are in the heating repair business you will try to rank for “your town heating repair” so put that at the beginning of your title, than follows the dash and then you can put “furnace repair your town, your state”. Notice how in the second part you reverse the order of the words and put a state at the end. The key here is to put your main keyword and some related terms. Also you need to be aware that Google will only display 65 characters from your title so make sure you don’t go over that number or your title will be cut off on the search engine result pages.

Open up Microsoft word or any other word processor and play with your title for a couple of minutes and you will come up with at least a couple of good title choices. But don’t sweat it too much, even if you just put your main keyword as the page title you are still going to be better than 95% of your competitors.