Saturday, September 17, 2011

SEO Tips For Local Businesses

By Takara Alexis


The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it would be illogical to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of time and money. A better approach would be to concentrate on your local community. You could be asking how this is possible, when the internet is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. This article gives you some tips to go local with SEO.

The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in Boston and you sell car insurance, you're most relevant keyphrase should be "car insurance Boston". Because this keyphrase includes your business and your location, it will drive people who are looking for car insurance in Boston in particular.

Metatags matter for search engines, don't forget to include your location together with your other keywords in the metatags of the pages of your site. Also, you must have your location in the keywords you use in the body of the text, if not it will look a little suspicious having a keyword in the metatag and not in the body. Keywords in the body text are very important and you can't afford to skip them. If your site is only optimized for "car insurance", this won't help you rank well with "car insurance Boston", so make sure that your location is part of your keywords.

Establishing backlinks with your location as anchor text is also a good tactic. It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as anchor text because some keywords with location are grammatically incorrect. You will end up having a hard time getting an organic inline link with this but you can use it in the Name field to comment on blogs.

Optimizing your site for global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of traffic but it can be difficult depending on the size of your demographic. Local search engines might be the real golden mine for your company. A local search engine might mean a search engine for the area but more likely for your country. An example would be Baidu; a great option if you are selling on the Chinese market.




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