I dont need to go on and on about just how most customer decisions and searched these days include the internet.
You already know that there is more to getting found in the search engines than just putting up a website and praying for traffic.
In the interest of brevity, respect for your time and a commitment to stand out from all the Bla Bla Bla on other blogs here are some of the best resources and a roadmap for you to get the most for your time and investment in optimizing your site for local search.

“First Do No Harm”

It is critical to note that Search engine optimization is, by definition, a manipulative business. It is never wise to attempt to actually trick, cheat, misrepresent your site or other shenanigans on the search engines. The best results of optimizing your site will occur naturally, kind of slowly over time if your main intent and goal is to serve the most complete, engaging, interesting and accurate information for the reader. If you can inspire your readers to take action of linking to, commenting on, sharing or recommending your site, that’s the most valuable optimization strategy and results you can earn.. It is usually a good idea to have a call to action, just ONE call to action per page asking them for one of those actions. As the search engine algorithms continue to evolve, the importance of the real social references, shares, likes,ratings and comments will continue to grow. Empower your readers and customers with the inspiration to do the talking for you and that will be the strongest foundation for any seo strategy. Never be led into doing any aggressive, irrelevant or highly automated linking to a local site to artificially inflate the numbers of links pointing to your site. comment spam, directory spam, social media spam, all those behaviors that you would never do face to face with a customer still apply in the rules of online engagement.  Good social skills are necessary for good seo skills and karma counts .

Fix up the Front of your house and make it easy for the googlebot mailman to find you and know what your site is about just from the address.

In other words, keep your onsite optimization tight, accurate and include the local geographical terms like your location within your title tag of at least one page and within the meta tags and meta descriptions at least on your home, about us or location page. If you dont know how to do this feel free to call me. Some other helpful ideas are to include pictures and have the location as part of the file name for the pic you upload and include alt tags with that location.  If you use a site like picasa photobucket or flickr you can also tag the images with locations while uploading them. Displaying images hosted out on one of those sites where many other location specific pictures are hosted can also be a help. for example a flickr account filled with hundreds of pictures of Madison, all having “Madison” within the title of the file, “Madison” within the caption of the image, and “Madison” within the tags will be more known and trusted as a strong source for “madison” than a site with few, or unlabeled, untagged or random subjects. Unless of course you had a bunch of photos of Detroit or baby pictures and just named them all “Madison” which would kind of suck.

Content and outbound connections

The search engines value your generosity in pointing to other related local resources if they improve the browser/surfers experience and help them find what they are searching for.  You need to write about and link to other locally relevant and helpful sites.  Write about the local happenings, other local bloggers, local events, give referrals, link to community organizations, non profits, stories of local interest, you get the picture.

Inbound links and citations

Perhaps the easiest and least creative steps to local search engine optimization are by submitting your site and all the appropriate info into local types of business directories. Continuity of data across all the directories definitely helps and having different data on different directories for the same Business can definitely hurt your local SEO. In other words, use the same exact name, address, phone number and business description on each local directory listing. Many directories are filled by an automated process and their found data is often out of date or out of sync with your current self written listings. check to see whats listed on your business even in listings you havent completed yourself and choreograph them all to be the same in all the pertinent details.

Create Only One listing per directory, per business location. Do Not create multiple Business listings within the same directory unless there are multiple locations with distinctly different addresses and phone numbers.

There are probably 50-80 local directories that add value but the big 3 are Google places aka Google maps, Yahoo local and Bing local. Filling out these listings seems simple enough but the fact of the matter is the majority of businesses do not have complete listings. Most do not list in most of the smaller directories. Most businesses do not encourage any traffic and reviews of their local listings. Sending your customers good karma good customer service emails thanking them for their business and including a link to one of your online reviewable directory listings will increase the number of reviews and ratings.  It is also speculated that google does not rank based on the sentiment of those reviews but more likely values the total number of ratings so even bad or mediocre reviews in high numbers have been seen to outrank unanimously great reviews in fewer numbers.

If you don’t have an email marketing program set up to turn more casual web visitors into first time customers or a follow up sequence to turn past customers into referring and returning customers please call me to help or get going on these right away.  I also have a few great resources of the top 75 sites to list your business in their directory and can even help create the video for you to use within your web directory listings. Im Also happy to help do the keyword research on the traffic the research terms and they buying terms for your industry since it’s surprising just how many times they are not exactly as you would think.

Including video, pictures, a well thought out keyword optimized business description and choosing the right categories all make a business listing stronger.  It is not worth it to pay to list into any of the local directories. The only possible exception to this is paying for inclusion into the Yahoo directory which costs $300 for them to review your site and is non refundable if they deny your listing. It is considerably more valuable to have lots of honest reviews done by authentic customers posted to google local, yelp, any site that takes them. Places like dane buy local directory is a good resource while the local greater Madison Chamber of Commerce is simply crap and not valuable to your search ranking at all. Having links point to your site from local websites like other businesses, local bloggers and news sites are valuable but one cool element in local SEO is that there doesent have to be a real live http:// type link pointing to your site for it to count as a “citation” which can also help boost your local SEO. In other words, it still helps (though not as strongly as a true link) having some of your business info listed in say a non profit directory of donors/sponsors adds value to your web ranking even if there is no link, just plain descriptive text.

Social Media optimization

This is perhaps one of the most interesting and potentially most rewarding to invest your thought and time.  As the web ranking algorithms evolve, interaction from the social media sites continues to grow. them ore engaged and supportive your community is for your social media efforts, the stronger these effects will boost your rankings.  Using local terms in your facebook, linkedin and twitter profile help. as do facebook places, facebook fan and group pages, gowalla, foursquare. the more fans, connections, retweets, likes shares all add up and improve the status of your presence on the web.  Geotargeting features and a website that is viewable for smartphones also improves the users experience. A sure way to be included within the  search results  on the first page in Google is to actually already have a social media connection or relationship with the searcher. If you are a twitter friend of the person, and they are following you, Big G typically includes your twitter profile at the bottom of the first page.

Offline local marketing

This may seem abit unusual to some of you, but having your weblink on your business card and within your offline advertising improves your local organic search results.  Google measures the searches for, the traffic to, and the duration spent on your site and if something you’re doing offline is driving people to actually go online to find you specifically, and they end up liking what they find, click around a few pages instead of clicking away and especially if they ever return, Google knows and tracks all that stuff , they assume if your site is compelling enough to the readers to motivate engagement and return visits, it must be worthy of being served up more highly in the search results.  Imagine whats known as the “Oprah”effect, after she announces some new product or find of hers, millions of people go searching for that very business, if they find it on their own, and Google sees they apparently like the site, they end up ranking that site higher for the next searcher.

Paid search traffic

Along the same lines as the previous notes about offline traffic building your rankings in local SEO, some people have seen their rankings improve by simply buying traffic through pay per click and geotargeted search engine advertising. Sure there is the traffic you buy but if they come to your site from paid traffic and they like it enough to buy or to return to the site again later, there will likely be a boost in the organic search rankings for the site based on a measured positive customer/surfers experience.  For many beginning sites or ones that have been languishing with no traffic, comments or conversions into customers, this is a good jump start to get fresh content noticed and get pages indexed higher in the search results.

Resources for further reading

I really like the technical , well supported and thorough way David Mihm presents his insight on SEO check out his Local ranking factors on his SEO Blog.   And Andrew Shotland has impressed me with his knowledge, generosity and resources too see his LocalSEOGuide blog.

I know of One other Killer strategically Decisive resource but I choose to only share that with my friends and clients. If you would like to know the name of a site/service that does all the keyword research, writes the persuasive and seo optimized sales/listing copy, lists your website into over 60 valuable directories and creates the videos for the listings, all at a price that’s so inexpensive you almost cant afford NOT to have them do it,  please call me for that Nugget of wisdom.

Im here in Madison, Wi at 608 245 2576 Bryan Bliss

Do you have any questions or tactics to add to the discussion? Please let me know what you’re thinking.

Thank you