For businesses catering to local markets it is important to enable people who are searching for your particular product or service to easily find your website.  This means that your search engine rankings should be high when people search for particular terms targeted to your market area.  For example, a California business that sells auto parts should be ranked on or near the top of the first page when a potential customer searches for something like “California auto parts”.  People searching for such terms have a tendency to click on and subsequently purchase from the sites that are listed in the top few results.

There are some basic techniques that can be used to increase your search engine optimization in local markets.  The first part is to ensure your website has plenty of relevant key words scattered throughout your site.  This can be done by using search terms in your text and image tags throughout your website. The trick is to do your homework; to research and  find “longtail” keywords. These are words that real users employ to find your product or service. They may not be what you think.

Another very useful tool is to use blogs to add relevant, useful content to your site.  This does two things.  First, it adds new content regularly to your site and allows you an opportunity to add manykeywords to your site.  Both techniques will help naturally increase your search engine optimization.

Offpage SEO is about increasing the number of incoming links to your website.  The more incoming links you have, the more importance the Search Engines place on your Site. One of the most popular and easiest ways to do this is to use social networking sites.  Linking new posts or newsworthy items to places such as FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter increases awareness to your site and you will get additional incoming links as well as traffic.

Social bookmarking is another strategies. These are user generated bookmarks, which the Search Engines highly value.

Video is probably your most effective tool. The search engines love video almost as much as viewers do. An effective video campaign will get you to the top of Google faster than any other method.

Your search engine ranking will increase naturally without any money and very little time and effort on your part.

However, if you have a bit of advertising budget you may want to invest in some targeted paid advertising.  Using tools such as Google AdWords is a great way to increase your search rankings in local markets.  You can control how much you spend and get a jump start on increasing your SEO with very little investment – if you do it right.  Using free and paid tools together will give you maximum benefit for optimizing your site for search engines in the local market.

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Filed under: SEO • Web Strategies

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