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Search Engine Optimization is a pretty well-known business. However, many people fail to realize there’s global SEO and local SEO. The item we’re going to talk about today is going to be local SEO. Local SEO that is targeting a specific area, whether that’s a city, state, or multiple cities.

Now, in order to begin, we should first look at our keywords. I want to make sure that our keywords actually target those specific areas. Good examples of that would be, for a plumber in College Station, Texas, our keyword phrase itself would be “plumber College Station Texas.” Now, some people might be asking why we don’t do “plumber and College Station Texas.” Most of the time, those two keywords will be the same, however, it’s good to actually compare those two against one another in say, the Google Adwords tool, because you might find that adding the word “and” can actually get you worse rankings or less searches, so it’s really good to compare those two to determine what works best for you. For our example we will be using “plumber College Station Texas.”

Now, whenever you do your search within the Google Adwords tool or any other keyword tool that you’re using, again, compare the two and also do a search for just your keyword itself. Depending on the keyword you’re trying to target, it might be better to actually target just the general keyword instead of one specifically tailored to your city. You want to make sure to pay attention to the actual number of searches, both globally and locally, depending on the keyword type.

Now, once you determine your keywords, you want to look at optimizing your internal pages. All the usual rules of regular SEO apply to local SEO, so you want to locate a keyword density of 3%—you don’t want to have too much, otherwise your page can appear as spam. If possible, you want to have your keyword twice in the title of the page. If your keyword is too long, that might not be possible. You also want to have your keyword twice in your description, usually towards the beginning and towards the end, and inside the body of your page, you want to have one of your keywords bold, and you also want to have it italicized if possible—this is just adding more ranking factors. You also want to make sure it’s appearing within your H1 tags, and if you also have H2 to H6 tags [0:02:24.1 within] the page, try to put your keywords in there, too. Again, just make sure it doesn’t look like spam.

Now, linking to this page, you want to make sure you have links to it from your homepage and from any kind of blog post concerning that subject—that way, you have a good internal link structure. And finally, since we are doing local SEO, we do want to have our address on the site. As we get further in to our local SEO optimization, that address is really going to come into play. Now, you can just simply put your address in the site, but it’s much better if you use the vCard style tags on the site, as it’s going to be better optimized.

Now, the next thing we want to look at is we want to get ourselves on Google Local, or how it’s referred to, Google Places. You want to have a listing for each of your locations, and for each of those locations, you want to have all the information [0:03:18.3 in, image] and not only just your name and the description of your business, you want to have your hours, your website, your phone-number, and

Copyright ©2012 Fast Track Sites

most importantly, the address, so whenever searches actually happen, it relates it to that specific address.

The next item on the list after that is you want to get into website directories such as dmoz, the Yahoo directory, or any other directory specifically tailored not only to your business, but to the location of your business.

Now, there’s a lot of information that’s not listed here, and there’s a lot more that we can go over with you, so in order to get more information, please feel free to contact one of our SEO pros today. We’d love to sit down and talk with you about local SEO.