There are two items that every person in America has in their homes; a computer and a phone book. Guess which one is used more often to look up a local business? Nobody uses the phone book these days, and if you even know where yours is it probably has an inch of dust on it.

It is estimated that there are 10 billion unique searches conducted each and every month on the internet and of those it is estimate that 40 percent or more are all local business searches. Is your website local search friendly? If not you are missing out on a ton of potential business.

So what are the best ways to get your website found when someone is conducting a local search? Here are some of the quickest and easiest ways to get your business’ website noticed at a local level:

Your Website: To begin with you should be sure that your full address appears somewhere on every page of your website. You should also include your phone number and five to ten surrounding local communities which you also serve.

Free Listings Online: When you do a local search on Google have you ever noticed how it will pull up a map and show all the businesses that are related to your search on that map? Notice how that map is before any search results? You can accomplish the same thing by registering with Google Maps for free. Additionally Yahoo has a service that is similar called Yahoo Local so take advantage of both!

Check Resources: There is a great resource you can check that is at getlisted.com. Using this resource you can see if your local listings have taken hold on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other local search sites and you will also get to see a snapshot of your business profile.

Now more than you have to have your website optimized using  a SEO that Specializes in Local Search. In the old days people had to search by business type followed by a city and state, such as ‘Plumber Buffalo, NY.’ Now though the search engines are using a technology called ‘geotargeting’ and all that needs to be searched now is ‘plumber.’ If the person conducting the search is in Buffalo, NY that same listing will come up as if the person searching types the search in the old fashion way.

More and more technology allows for people to conduct searches for businesses without ever cracking open a phone book. Now with cell phones being live and online it is easy for people to conduct a search for a business on the fly. If your website is not local search friendly then you are throwing away money.

Face it; no one is using their phone books for anything more than propping up a toddler at the dinner table. By making your website not only SEO friendly, but also SEO local friendly you are giving yourself an advantage over all of your competitors that still think the Yellow Pages are the way to go.

Even if you do not know how to make your website SEO local friendly you can still take advantage of the free resources listing above. Additionally, if you no longer having to advertise in the phone book you will be saving yourself some valuable marketing dollars. Those dollars will be much better spent by acquiring some SEO local help in the form of an internet marketer.

The bottom line is that your business and your website can either continue to go on the way they have with little results, or you can become a local authority. Imagine how much more your business can make if every time someone conducts a local search they see your website and business name in the top spots of the search engines. Whatever you decide to do, stop advertising in the phone book because chances are nobody will look for you in there.

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One of the best ways to get your website ranked just so happens to also be one of the least expensive. Using proper search engine optimization (SEO) means that your website will be ranked naturally or organically as the search engine spiders (robots) will find your designated keywords and index you accordingly.

Many people will use SEO tricks to fool the spiders, but the thing is that the search engines know all the tricks and this type of activity can actually end up hurting you in the long run. In order to get the most out of your SEO exploits you don’t want to fool the search engines but rather let them know in a clear manner that you are indeed online and worthy of being ranked.

Here are some ways to use proper SEO techniques in order to be naturally ranked by the search engines:

Title Page: For each page on your website you should be writing a title page. This title page should be heavy with keywords that you would think will be used when people are conducting a search for your site. Using five to eight keywords is a good rule of thumb and you want to limit the number of fluff words such as “and,” “the,” and the like but you also need to be sure that the title page reads well. This title page is what the person searching the web will see as a returned result on the search engine itself. You will want to be sure that the keywords or key phrases that people will use first, will appear first in your title page. If you sell dog food for example then be sure to mention dog food even before the name of your business.

META Tag: Certain search engines will have this type of description just under your hyperlinked title in the search results. For this reason you have to be sure that you are using keywords and phrases that are also contained in the web page that the hyperlink leads to. Use a maximum of 255 characters when typing your META tag for your best results even though only 60 or so will be seen inside search engine giant Google because what isn’t seen can still get you ranked.

Headers: Be sure to include your keywords in your headers. As far as the search engines are concerned the page headline and sub-head line are important to the page. Because of that fact you want to be sure that you have your main key words for that page within the headers. Many designers will not designate H1, H2 within their set up of your web pages. Be sure that they do however as this is a big clue for the search engines and leaving it out is like leaving a treasure to be found with no map to lead you to it.

First Paragraph: It is a common practice for a writer to have the first paragraph of content to be an introduction of what is to come, but this approach often leaves the keywords out of the equation of the opening paragraph. It is of utmost importance that your keywords (especially the main keyword for the page) are included in your first paragraph. However, you cannot simply “stuff” in your keywords and end up with a paragraph or page that doesn’t read right. The opening paragraph and the entire page have to read properly or the search engines will not recognize the content as legit. Your overall keyword density per page should only be about two percent maximum so avoid the urge to overuse your keywords.

Image Tags: In order to cater to those who are somewhat site impaired and to leave even more clues to the search engines that you are worthy of a good ranking use descriptive keywords in your ALT Attributes of all Image Tags. This will in turn help get you ranked higher for image results.

This is all basic stuff, but you would be surprised at the number of websites that do not use even half of these simple yet effective SEO techniques. Therefore you can see your website do better than a great majority out there if you take the time to properly optimizes your web pages.

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques come in a wide variety of implementations. Some of these techniques are easy and some are more complex, but each is important in its own way. Once you have the basics of your SEO complete it will then be time to fine tune your SEO so to speak.

Here are some ways that you will want to fine tune your SEO for the highest possibility of search engine rankings:

·    Navigation System: You will want to be sure that the navigation system within your website is not only user friendly but also search engine friendly as well. Java and Flash is really appealing to people, but not to search engine spiders. If you are going to use a lot of Flash on your pages that is fine, but you must be sure to supplement this with HTML links at the bottom of the page so that the spiders can crawl all of your pages and get there from your index (home) page.

·    Site Map: Creating a site map is the best way to lead both visitors and spiders through the maze of pages that you may have within your website. You can use XML-Sitemaps.com to create a site map that will be recognized by the major search engines. Once your site map is completed and uploaded you will want to be sure that you submit it to Google, Yahoo, and Bing by following their specific instructions.

·    Multiple Web Pages: When it comes to getting ranked more is better with web pages. Using external doorway or gateway pages can lead to a lot of web page duplication. Even if the pages are not 100 percent alike, Google and the others may say, “Close enough,” and this may earn you a penalty. Instead, create pages or articles for each keyword no matter how similar, such as one page for canned dog food and another for bagged dog food and so on. You won’t be able to fully optimize each page, but you will be able to avoid getting on the search engines bad side.

·    Use Tools: Using software such as WebPosition will help you determine where you’re currently ranked for each page on your website. Once you know where you stand you can further tweak and finesse your pages in order to help get them ranked higher.

This is the point where you may be scratching your head and wondering how the heck you are going to do all of this and when will you have the time. This is also the point where many will seek the council of an experienced SEO marketer.

This is nothing to be ashamed of and if you do decide to go with an SEO marketer at this point be sure that they are reputable and available. While price is certainly “a” factor it should not be “the” factor when making your decision. Always ask for examples of the SEO marketers work and references as well. A quality SEO marketer will be delighted to showcase their successes for you.

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Links links, and more links. Links are a vital part of your website for more than just the obvious reason that the more people link to your website, the more traffic you are bound to get. Links also mean that the big search engines can determine how popular your website is and reward you accordingly by placing you higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Yes the online game is certainly one that is a popularity contest and links are a great indicator of just how well you are fairing in the contest. However, all links are not created equally. You will get much more credit when a website that has a high page rank is linking to you over a couple of different low page ranking websites that are linking to you.

So how do you get the links to start rolling in? Here are some methods to try when you want to make your website fit in with the “popular” crowd:

Submit to Directories: Submit your website to key directories as links from these types of directories will help your ranking. Some link directories are pay and some are free. While you may thing that free is better, in this case it may not be. Look at the actual page rank of the directory before you make that decision. Page ranks of zero and one that are free will do you little good, but page ranks of five and seven that may cost you a buck or two will be beneficial. DMOZ.com is a great freebie and you can go for the big dogs like Yahoo but you will pay for it (Yahoo is $299.00 per year).

Submit to Trade Organizations: Submit your website to specialized directories known as trade organizations. These types of directories are often pay directories but if they are specialized in your industry such as finance or business, then it may be worth your while to give them a few dollars. Be careful of the specialized directories that offer you a free link but ask you to upgrade. These types come and go and usually give no precedence to those who only opt to use the freebie link.

Ask for Reciprocal Links: If you don’t ask you won’t know. Search for other websites within your niche and get in touch with them and ask if they would be interested in exchanging links. This should be done via e-mail and once you start to accumulate some of these and your popularity goes up you will begin to get requests in your inbox on a rather frequent basis. However, don’t jump at every opportunity to link with another website. Only link with websites that compliment your own no matter how high the website may be ranked. The search engines love relevancy and hate irrelevancy. If the search engines don’t like your links, they don’t like you (unpopular) and your page rankings will suffer for it.

Write for Others: If you have a talent for writing then you can use this to your advantage. Not everyone is an eloquent writer and so you may be able to find websites that are in need of some articles to be written in exchange for a link to your website. All you have to do is find high ranking websites within your niche and offer them an article to use for free as long as you can have an anchor text linking at the end of the article with a one or two sentence description about your website. This is a win for a website that needs quality content and a one way link win for you that can end up producing a huge amount of traffic for you.

Use Press Releases: Find newsworthy events within your niche and create a press release about them. Many press release services will allow you to put a link to your website at the end of the press release and this link can end up being in their queue for months at a time. The result will be more traffic and a temporary increase on your popularity. Be sure that you are preparing the press releases in the proper format as many press release services have a different way they like their press releases to be written.

The building of high quality links on your website is a long and often boring task. However, there is no better way to help the popularity of your website and once the popularity is high enough you will begin to see lots of traffic which can translate into lots of sales and finally lots of money. Just as with many things in life, sometimes you have to work hard to reap the benefits and rewards, but once you do you are happy that you did. Link building is no different.

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