SE Optimization: Local Search Optimization: Think Globally, Act Locally

Local Search Optimization: Think Globally, Act Locally

Written by SEO Services

Many small businesses need to have an online presence and sell their products or services locally. For instance, doctors, dentists, real estate agents and restaurants can all benefit from online marketing but only on a local scale, not globally. In order to tap into repparttar

local market, however, it may be necessary to make some global changes to your website.

In order to target a website to a local market, it is important that 3 key areas be addressed:

1. Global website text changes targeting local keywords 2. Geographical meta tag implementation 3. Getting indexed by Yahoo! Local

In regards to global website text changes, let’s take, for example repparttar 135631 case of repparttar 135632 Romeo Cuccina restaurant in Nowhere, Ohio. This family-owned Italian restaurant wants to be found by people in and around Nowhere, Ohio and by people traveling to this location. The body text of repparttar 135633 Romeo Cuccina restaurant needs to contain repparttar 135634 name Nowhere, Ohio, plus references to repparttar 135635 surrounding towns and attractions along with its Italian restaurant keywords, which will also be scattered throughout repparttar 135636 text. The title text and repparttar 135637 H1 tag should also contain repparttar 135638 words ‘Nowhere, Ohio’ as well. Making sure that these geographical keywords are in repparttar 135639 text, names of repparttar 135640 graphics and links will help this website do well in repparttar 135641 search engines for local searches.

In regards to geographical meta tag implementation, this is simply a tag with repparttar 135642 company name and address that will help establish a website locally. This tag can be used on repparttar 135643 homepage, About Us page and / or Contact Us page as well. In our Italian restaurant example, repparttar 135644 tag will look like this:

Do search engines like your Web site?

Written by Paul Silver and David Rosam

Between 75% and 98.8% of visitors to Web sites come from searches made at search engines. If you're going to get high levels of traffic - and hence repparttar

levels of ROI you're looking for - it's very important that repparttar 135498

search engines can access all repparttar 135499

information on your Web site.

Do repparttar 135500 search engines know about all of your pages?

You can find out which pages on your site repparttar 135501 search engines know about by using a special search. If you search for 'site:' and your Web site address, repparttar 135502 search engine will tell you all of repparttar 135503 pages on your Web site it knows about.

For example, search for: site:webpositioningcentre.co.uk in Google. Yahoo or MSN Search, and it will tell you how many pages they know about.

If repparttar 135504 search engines haven't found some of repparttar 135505 pages on your Web site, it is probably because they are having trouble spidering them. ('Spidering' is when repparttar 135506 search engine uses an automated robot to read your Web pages.)

Spiders work by starting off on a page which has been linked to by another Web site, or that has been submitted to repparttar 135507 search engine. They then read and follow any links they find on repparttar 135508 page, gradually working their way through your whole Web site.

At least, that's repparttar 135509 theory.

The problem is, it's easy to confuse repparttar 135510 spiders - especially as they are designed to be wary of following certain kinds of link.

Links which confuse spiders

If your links are within a large chunk of JavaScript code, repparttar 135511 spider may not be able to find them, and will not be able to follow repparttar 135512 links to your other pages.

This can happen if you have 'rollovers' as your navigation - for instance, pictures that change colour or appearance when you hover your mouse pointer over them. The JavaScript code that makes this happen can be convoluted enough for repparttar 135513 spiders to ignore it rather than try to find links inside.

If you think your rollovers are blocking your site from being spidered, you will need to talk to your Web designers about changing repparttar 135514 code in to a 'clean link' - a standard HTML link, with no extra code around it - that is much easier for repparttar 135515 spiders to follow.

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