There are no hard and fast rules and even if there were they would change but here are some things you need to begin to think about to bury your competition in local search game.

Title tags - Probably one of most important info on your page anyway so make sure your title reads something like "YOURFIRMNAME Kansas City's oldest bakery

H1 tags - Make sure that your keywords for your site and your geography have H1 tags - The Best Baked Brioche in Peoria, Il

Content - Add your address and phone number early and prominently (not a bad thing for every page really)

Meta tags - Opinions vary on usefulness of these but there are some tags that may gain usefulness depending on how search engines refine their methods. meta name="zipcode" content="64105,64113,64112,64110,64106,66207,66208,66210 meta name="city" content="Kansas City" meta name="state" content="Missouri, Kansas" meta name="ICBM" content="39.10246, -94.59009 City, State, and Zip code tags are pretty self explanatory but ICBM one is a bit out there but kind of cool too.

If you go to GEOUrl Address Server you can locate exact latitude and longitude of your business. That's what those two numbers after ICBM tag are. (Of course I think that is same system they use to target bombs.)

Linking - Make your internal links local friendly - Instead of "Remodeling Projects" use "Omaha Kitchen Projects"

DMOZ - The Open Directory Project is a directory of sites that are listed by human volunteers. It seems that getting listed here gives you high marks with search engines so you need to do it but make sure that you go for Regional listings all way down to your town. It is unlikely (and not very useful) that you will get listed for a broad category, particularly if you don't provide world-wide service. Go for poodle clipping section of your town and you will have better luck.

Other Directories - Another good reason to get listed in DMOZ for your town is that other local directories like Verizon's Smart Pages and SBC's Yellow Pages rely on these listing as well. By way, get listed in as many of these phone book type of directories like Smart Pages as you can. Some are free and there is speculation that initially big search engines will rely on these already built local directories.

There...that should keep you busy

Once you finally have pr4/10 for 4 of your pages, now you can finally raise your ranking. Here's fun part...

I want you look at your site and see if you actually list all your pages on all your pages. If you don't, do this step right away and keep it clean. I know some of you might be thinking, well I have too many to list, or some of your might be thinking, I am already doing that.

Just stick to that formula because once you have 4 of your pages with pr4/10 it won't be long before your entire site goes to pr4 (Given that all your pages are listed on all your pages).

Once this happens, next step is PR5!

The norm for pr5 is to get about 50-70 pr4 links. Whether they are internally or externally. Please note that you need 50-70 pr links for one page alone in order to raise that specific page to pr5. So if you want to raise your main page to pr5, get 50-70 pr4 links to that page.

I hope we all know what happens to pages that are ranked 4/10 or better don't we? Our search engine rankings get better!

Have fun with this one and always remember to keep tweaking your structure in order to get most out of your entire web site, not just your main page!

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux Smartads - President

Affordable Web Design & Web Advertising http://www.smartads.info / http://www.smartads.ca

Eye Catching Print Design http://www.3dimentionaldesign.com

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