This article is intended to introduce the business owner that may be a novice to implementing an effective local Internet search campaign intended to increase their customers. I have decide to publish this article in Three Parts because of the amount of information contained in each section, so I guess the first topic to cover is, what is local search engine optimization, and how domain names affect search engine raking.
Search engine optimization is the process of promoting your website to get top "organic" or unpaid search results. These are the free results that are displayed on the right side of most search engine search results, and not the sponsored listings. In other words, if your site is not in the "Top 20" of these search results for your local area, you're losing customers.
Now, to get you listed in these results, each of the top three search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo have their own ranking algorithms which we won't get into now. But, the techniques contained in this article will work for all three engines.
If you are reading this, chances are you are trying to promote a local site that you currently have online. But, if you have not registered your site, the first technique we will discuss carries a lot of weight in all the search engines. And, if you already have a site up and running I will show you ways to use this same technique, so don't get discouraged.
Register a domain name that has a keywords about your business, or the city you operate in. Search engines put great importance on keywords, or search phrases in the domain name, for example I own a search engine optimization firm, so my domain name contains the keywords "SEO" so it's indexed as For local searches you could also incorporate your city into the domain name like , which will get high rankings when potential clients search for "barbers in houston."
A domain name does not have to be the official name of your business, unless you're a fortune 500 company like Microsoft, where you have name recognition and potential clients will search for you by name. So feel free to register your domain name so that it contains keywords or phrases or even your city in the domain.
Oh, I didn't forget about those of you that have already registered your domain. No you don't have to go out and register a new domain; you can get some of the same benefits of including keywords or a city in your domain by labeling your directories using these same techniques. Search engines also display directories that contain keywords or local cities in their search results.
And, for those of you that are not familiar with the definition of a directory, it is that part of the website that contains information other than contained on the main web page. Foe example lets go back to my site: /seo_articles/index.html. The section of the URL that says "seo_articles" is considered a directory; it contains all the articles I have written about SEO techniques. The directory can contain whatever information you want to include in it, like your About Page, FAQ Pages, or Product Descriptions, just remember to name them with a keyword that matches your business.
In the next installment we will cover meta titles and meta descriptions, this is usually the information that is displayed when a search engine displays the search results for a given keyword or phrase.
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