Last week we discussed the importance of and how to optimize listings on local directories. This week we are going to look at optimizing your website itself for local search.
Optimizing your actual website content should also be an important part of your local awareness efforts on the web. Optimizing titles, descriptions, header tags, body text and alt text should all be focused on the city/region for which you are optimizing by including the city/region name liberally throughout the landing page or site pages being optimized.
If your business has more than one location, but only one website, it is imperative to have a landing page for each and ensure that the information is current and has proper address tags. The landing page will have information on each locality that is specific to that location.
Another important step is to use a geo sitemap and a regular site map and make them accessible from the root directory of your website.
A final note is that you have a lot of competition out there and one way to make sure there is some interest in the search terms you want to rank for is to user the Regional Interest Map on Google's Insights for Search -http://www.google.com/insights/search. This tool allows you to see which state and metropolitan areas index high against search volume for a particular word or phrase.
