Do It Yourself Local SEO

Do it yourself local SEO.

As promise, here are the key tactics to make sure your local business is visible for local searches.

First, make sure your web site and business is listed in the major search engine local directories. A great resource for this is www.getlisted.org. This will allow your site to come up on the Google local maps, and the yahoo and Bing local directories for search terms that relate to your business.

Make sure to completely fill out your local directories. Pay careful attention to the categories you choose. Each directory offers different opportunities, so take your time and fill them out with all the information they request. This process should take about 90 minutes all together, and it’s the best 90 minutes you will spend on local search engine optimization.

Second, make sure your local address is prominently displayed on your home page, with your phone number. Add it to your contact page as well. Also, you may want to search on Google for your business to see if you have any old listings online with an old address or phone number. If so, do contact the site or directory and ask then to either changed it, or delete it. Search engines hate conflicting information. Only use an actually physical address. Google doesn’t accept P.O. boxes.

Third, make sure (as in all SEO), your title and description meta tags have your main keywords in them. Also add your keywords to your headline of your home page. Don’t over do this, make it natural. It’s important that the search engines understand what your site is about.

Now you have a good start! It’s time to get “votes” for your site with the search engines. Votes are when other sites link back to, or mention your business on their sites. As search engine optimization becomes more and more competitive (lets face it, more businesses are paying for it then ever) and there are only 10 or so sites listed on the first page of a search, and the top three get the vast majority of the traffic, in many cases you are going to need a lot of high quality votes.

The first place to look is with associations you belong to. The B.B.B. is a great link, and so are many chambers and associations. Check and see if your listing has your web site on it.

After that, add good local directories. Go to Google and search Your City Directories. You will find a ton, and many will have categories that fit your company well.

Plan on spending about 30 minutes a day linking for a few months, and maybe a lot more. Yes, that’s what it’s going to take.. I could write a book about link quality (the type of links that pay off) and how to research for them, but if you are doing your own SEO, this is a great start. If you want several excellent researches you can subscribe to www.seomoz.com , or SEObook.com

I do want to leave you with two additional thoughts. A great start for back linking is www.metasocialweb.com You can add your site, plus your blog, and all your social sites. It’s a powerhouse SEO, Social media tool. Yes it does cost money, but you may find that many valuable sites do, because they are human edited (A big plus) and they have to pay to keep the site up and running. We built Metasocialweb.com to help small business with Social media, and it turns out to be great for SEO too!

If you want a jump start on links every month you can subscribe to our Do It Your Self SEO package that provides the information on 20 quality links we have already researched. Or our starter SEO packages where we do the linking for you.