Before you start on Local SEO, it is crucial to understand how it is different from general SEO. So, before you get started, highly recommended you check out the Local SEO Checklist produced by WebProNews. This Local SEO checklist is particularly helpful if you do not know much about local internet marketing.
What is Local SEO? Local SEO is the optimizing of the internal linking structure in your website. Internal linking structure refers to the links within your site that point to the location pages. The purpose of these is to connect the content on the location pages with the main content pages. So, when someone goes to the home page and clicks on the Google map button, the location page will be displayed and this will help him land on your sales page because he has been directed to your sales page by using internal links.
But how are these links used? Well, in order to optimize your small business for local search engines, you need to have good internal linking structure for your website. If you do not have this link building strategy, your website may not appear on search engines as these algorithms believe that there should be some local information within your site. Moreover, the search engines use this information as one of the factors they rank websites. If you want your small businesses to rank high on Google, you need to optimize your local information within your site.
You can do this by building the link popularity through social media and social bookmarking with communities like Twitter and Facebook, and through Digg, StumbleUpon and many other social media sharing systems. You can also get inbound links by submitting your site to directory submissions like Yahoo, DMOZ and others. But in order for your web pages to get quality backlinks, you must have a local seo plan.
The most important part of local seo plan is building up your domain authority. It is through this that you will get high page rankings and higher web traffic since these links are coming from trusted web sources like Google and Yahoo. And if your domain authority is high enough, it is also expected that your web traffic will be high enough as well.
You can make use of local checklists and optimize your site. These checklists will give you suggestions when you are planning to optimize your site for local search. You can opt to do it manually or through software. Most people prefer manual optimization through checklists. There are many checklists that are available online and you can check them out for more details and recommendations.
Another important local optimization tool is the all-in-one SEO tools that will give you suggestions based on your data from the past three months. This will also give you advice-local citations that you can use to your advantage. Google, Yahoo and MSN offer free service to local website owners. All you need to do is register your domain name and create an account. The all-in-one SEO tool will provide you guidance on finding and checking free local citations.
If you think that all-in-one SEO tools are already too much for you, then there is still another useful local optimization tool that you can avail of which is the Google Toolbar Local. This tool is very easy to use because you just need to give your domain name or website and tap the Google Toolbar button. From there, you will be able to view all backlinks that you have gathered in the past three months. This tool also provides you with the option to set up alerts so that you will be informed whenever new backlinks are added or when their ranks change.https://www.youtube.com/embed/eZY7BcYY6ow