Local Search Engine Optimization - Local Search Engine Optimization Basics
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Include your address on many pages and make sure it is consistent. Here's a good format to follow (by no means the rule):
Company Name
Street Address
City, State, Zip
Phone
Fax
You can plug this into a footer, which is a clear indication to all sorts of bots that this is your address. A good guess is that bots are programmed to specifically put weight on pages with filenames such as "contact," "contact-us,""about," etc, so be sure to drop addresses there as well.
Be sure to include local variations of keywords on your local pages. For example, if you're a real estate guy in CA, make sure to vary CA and California within your content, because searches use both. Google is smarter at detecting and serving listings with only one occurrence (for example CA only is considered California by Google, assuming other indicators match), but other bots are dumber.
Get listings on local directories, Yellow Pages and local consumer sites. If you're after several cities, get links with local anchor text pointing to your local pages in order to pass page rank flow. Put up links from your high PR pages to the local pages with targeted anchor text, and several links to the most important local pages from the home page. This will cause high PR pages to pass PR and help local pages rank for their terms.
Google puts less weight on footer links, since those are usually used for SEO.
Target one city or per page. It's okay to target city municipalities on one page, since they merge the city together, but targeting Chicago and New York on one page isn't effective for both SEO and the user's experience.
Use targeted filenames, titles and H tags. Vary them from one another to decrease SEO footprints. For example, a real estate agent in Chicago:
<Title> Chicago Illinois Real Estate Agent Buy and Sell Homes in Chicago Area
(title may change as you target more keywords per page)
Filename: "chicago-real-estate-agent"
<H1> Sell and Buy Your Real Estate With a Professional Agent in Chicago IL
<H2> Over $400,000,000 real estate sales in Chicago
Etc...
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