Local SEO Techniques to Grow Your Business - Search Engines - SE Positioning

One of the best ways for local businesses to promote themselves is by getting local search engine traffic. If you are looking for some good ideas for local SEO, the following techniques will help you.

Writing an SEO'd classified ad is one of the best ways to leverage local SEO--this is an easy tip to take to heart. This is an easy way to take advantage of the local searches because the search engines tend to favor such sites and when you use them, you increase the chances of driving direct local traffic to your website. When you are beginning your efforts you should start with Craigslist because it is the most popular classified web site on the internet. Posting SEO'd ads on Craigslist regularly is something that you need to do. You need to make sure you target your ads to your chosen market. Take care that your ad is simple and not garish. When you write the ad, focus on the title because this is what increases most of the response. Use your keyword phrase in the title along with your city and state. Be as careful with your Craigslist ad as you are with your landing page because, typically, the ad will outrank the actual site in the search engine rankings. So a good st rategy is to use the Craigslist ad as a channel to funnel in the traffic towards your site, which is your ultimate aim. Apart from that, you can use USFreeAds, which doesn't work as well as Craigslist, but nevertheless it can give you a good response since it is a well ranked classified oriented site. What you should be trying to do with your ads is to send as much traffic as you can to your major site either directly or by piggy backing off of the traffic to the site.

It's important to have distinct landing pages if your business has more than one location. For local sites, the rule is to avoid having more than a single listing for one business, but if the business has more than one location, there is no reason not to have a listing for each one. What you have to do, though, is make sure that you create a different landing page for every location, and each one should clearly refer to that one in particular. It's not a good SEO practice, however, to send local traffic for several different locations to one home page or landing page. It's important to make everything clear to your prospects, and distinct landing pages accomplish this. Even though this might look like a simple thing, it does matter.

It is also very smart to work on getting your company listed in the Yellow Pages directory (and other directories like it). Other good directories to begin with are SuperPages.com, YellowBook.com and YelloPages.com. It is notable that YellowPages.com gets tons of local searches each month (over 100 million) and they still offer free listings too. At the same time, SuperPages.com supplies its business listings to the bigger portals like MSN and About.com. Their listing is free but is very basic.

In conclusion, use the techniques you just learned about and you'll master SEO in no time.