It is advisable to have the local phone number and the physical address across all the pages. Include a toll free number but give prominence to the local number as it helps search engines identify the area of the business establishment.
Use Geographical qualifiers such as city names, county names, state names, and streets in the title tag, the h1 and h2 tags as well as the body. This gives your location more prominence in the search engines.
It is also recommended to have a location/directions page, with a map embedded from Yahoo or Google maps, with the directions explicitly written out.
Offsite optimization factors: It is advisable to have the anchor text for incoming links to hold
local qualifiers.
Submission in major search engines: All the major search engines namely Google, Yahoo,
Ask and MSN have a local business center where the local business should be submitted. Enter your business information details such as County, Street address, zip code, phone number, and business hours along with a brief description of your business; also select the category and sub category that most aptly describes your business. The category in the
example we have cited above would be restaurants and the sub category would be the cuisine the restaurant is serving.
Once you're done, your business listing shows up in the local section of the search engine. The local section of most search engines is integrated with maps, and hence the listing will appear on the map.
A search with the selected keywords on Google Maps will list the text results on the left panel of the page and a map display on the right.
With the search engines integrating results across all categories, the prominence of local results has increased manifold. The local search results box is the first to be displayed in the search engine result pages. If you happen to search for 'Restaurant Buffalo NY' the first result you get on Google is a set of 10 local results.
What is interesting, however, is that the listing of results differs from that on
local.google.com. It is understood that Google uses different algorithms to rank the results in both the sections.
For search marketers, the listings on the Universal search window become more important as it is the primary source of traffic from a search engine.
There are certain studies that see a correlation between the ratings, the number of reviews and the rankings of a local search result. It is, therefore, advisable to promote and gain good
reviews for your product.
Other search engines, yellow pages and directories: There are other specific local search
engines which are capable of diverting huge amounts of traffic to your site or establishment. There are directories which are also used as information sources by major search engines. Some of these are listed as follows:
• Yelp.com • Local.com • Infousa.com • yellowpages.com • superpages.com • Citysearch.com
As a company looking to harness the potential of Local SEO, it is imperative that all the above provided details are studied and analyzed to maximize traffic and visibility.
7.2 Link Baiting
Link baiting is the process in which you use a bait or a hook to attract back links. It refers to something unique or interesting on your website that would want others to link to it. A hook or bait generally refers to link worthy content written for websites, blog posts and online articles and then submitted on popular sites. It could also refer to tools, widgets and other useful online applications. When content is written it is also important to ensure that the title also serves as attractive bait to the audience. The bait or the hook could take one of the following forms:
• Resource Hook: These are hooks that generally provide useful resources to the audience. A useful tool such as a stock exchange ticker or a compilation of resources useful to a particular niche or domain is a good example of the same. People are always on the lookout for
resources that would be meaningful and useful to them. As such, a resource hook acts as a strong bait to gain incoming links.
Example: Must read search marketing blogs
• News Hook: This hook banks on providing the latest news first. It could also be a
compilation of stories following a particular news item. This type of hook works best over a period of time. One needs to regularly post interesting news articles which slowly establish credibility as an expert.
Example: Jakob Nielsen Not Optimistic about Personalized Search
• Contrary Hook: A contrary hook looks at views contrary to an established or perceived school of thought. It usually takes up a contradictory or controversial view of what someone has said or written.
• Attack Hook: This is quite similar to the contrary hook but seeks to be more provocative, direct and upfront in nature. The advantage of an attack hook is that the hook could attract the most number of links if your content is perceived to be credible and authentic.
Example: Aaron Wall gets sued for blogging
For both the contrary hook and the attack hook it is advised to make sure that the facts are properly checked and corroborated before the post/article is published. A seemingly non credible post can get a lot of negative reviews which could affect all future posts as well. • Humor Hook: This type of hook seeks to bring in some aspect of humor into the daily mundane lives of people. As a hook it can turn out to be very effective as people like to see something bizarre or funny in the midst of their daily routines. The humor hook stands out and is thus able to gain quite a few links.
Example: Top 21 signs you need a break from SEO
7.3 Google Webmaster Central
Google being the most widely used search engine in the world offers many services that help webmasters and Online Marketing professionals promote their website better. Among other services Google provides tools to:
• Diagnose, analyze and solve crawling, and indexing issues so as to enable Google to easily crawl and index your site.
• Get help for potential issues in crawling and indexing through the Google Help center or the discussion group.
• Submit content to various Google services such as the Google search Index, Google Book search, Google Video and Google Base.
• Enhance site functionality through the use of Google Gadgets, Google Developer Tools and Google site search.
• Analyze traffic to the site through Google Analytics and understand where your visitors are coming from.
Google provides a single window to access these services. This central repository is known as Google Webmaster Central.