Optimizing Your Website Specifically For Local Search Engines
Search engines have standardized key benchmarks for all the websites existing on the Internet. Every website is striving hard to meet those benchmarks to improve their online presence and obtain higher search engine rankings. While every online business has to cater a specific target market, a website owner needs to define his plan of action to ensure a proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy for his business.
If you are a local business and have only local market to target on, you can achieve your goals by following simple SEO fundamentals mentioned in this article.
To improve online presence and increase traffic on the website, you would definitely want to appear higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Let’s find out the ways to make this possible:
1. Target Market: It is important for you to know what your customers’ expectations are all about. This is important while you are doing online business as you will be able to make a list of specific keywords that will be usually used by your target market to search products and services.
2. Title Tags: While On-page SEO optimization is important for a website, title tags hold its special place among SEO techniques. So, after finalization of keywords, you can begin with creating title tags of every webpage so that search engines can understand the nature and type of the website while crawling each page of the website. Only creating title tags for each web page is not sufficient but you have to make it unique too. You can recheck its uniqueness by following the below method on Google:
Site:yoursite.com intitle:‘the words in the title’
3. Add City Name In Your Title Tags: As you have a local market, you must add your city name in the titles so that it can become more accessible to people living in your targeted area. In addition, you can also add city name in the Meta description and be sure that the description is also unique.
4. Focusing Keywords in Content: While focusing keywords on title tags are important, you can not leave out keywords in the content of the web page. You can use H1 tags to highlight the most important keywords so that it can be easily indexed in search engine results. The H1 tag is used in the headline of the page that also engages visitors to stay longer on the webpage.
5. Separate Web Pages: In local business ventures, you may have different sale offices in various parts of the country. In such cases, you must create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. This will also help you to focus on specific cities to cater larger audience.
6. Add Your Address To Every Web Page: A website have multiple web pages providing details of various products and services. Therefore, you need to have address and contact details on every webpage focusing on specific locations. Search engines will also filter the pages as per the locations by making it less competitive.
7. Add Few Internal Links: Every website has different product and services so a website owner has to prioritize the web pages that need to obtain higher rankings on search engines. The home page is the most important page of the site and all the pages that are linked with its home page hold extra value in front of search engines. So, prioritize your links and link only those that you want to rank higher than others.
8. Technical Issues: Make sure that you stay away from all types of technical issues that may prevent you from ranking on search engines. You can identify all the problems by signing up your site on Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools. This will help you to identify the problems that Google have with your website. Once you get to know the number of issues, you can get it rectified by SEO experts at the earliest.
9. Link-Building: While all the above points are essential for a website, you can’t ignore the importance of link building towards your website. The search engines give preference for those sites that have maximum number of links aimed at the site. It acts as a sign of quality and trust in front of search engines. To obtain maximum links, you can include off-page optimization activities like writing and submitting articles, press releases, classifieds and blogs. You can also add your business information on social media sites, bookmarking etc.
Every website owner has to understand that SEO is an on-going process like any other marketing tactic for a business. While people are largely relying on local search engines, site owners can not ignore SEO as an important part of their marketing plan. Therefore, it is essential to consult an SEO specialist who will help you to have in-depth knowledge about SEO and its benefits for the business.
http://www.rankcatalyst.com/
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