improve ranking on google local business results

If you want to find your businesses website or local listing at the top of the search results, it is not as hard as you might have thought. As long as your know the steps to take that matter in the eyes of the search engines. Local listings in Google can be a great traffic booster for your website. Being at the top of the search listings also ads credibility for you website. We have put together a list of the most important steps for getting listed in the local search results.

If possible, you will need to make several adjustments to your website. Anytime you make changes on your website to gain rankings in the search engines, this is known as search engine optimization. You need to make sure that you address and phone number are listed on your website in a way that google can read. This means having your phone number in a picture is simply not good enough. Ideally, your contact information and address will be on every page of you website in the footer. if you do not want to this, at least have it on a contact page. On you contact page, use the Hcard format. Google "hcard generator" to get the proper format then paste the code to your website. If you cannot figure this out, at least put your address and phone number on the page in text format.

After this is done you are going to want to claim your local listing in the google local business center (www.google.com/local/add). You do this by logging on to your Google account. If you don't have one, make one. Go to the local business center and add a local listing. Make sure that you use the keywords you are targeting in the business name. This will go a long way towards ranking. Make sure to add as many videos, pictures, and info that you possible can. Then go to yahoo and do the same. (listings.local.yahoo.com)

One of the things that you can do to get a little bit of a boost with Google ( we are not debating the ethicality of this, is to get a P.O. Box or physical address as close as possible to the what google considers the center of a city. If instead you are targeting a zipcode. Makesure to use the zipcode in your keywords, and get an address at the center of that zipcode.

You are going to want to use a local number and not an 800 number. This will have a good impact on your ranking as well. Using a local number will have an effect on your rankings.

Next all you have to do is go out and get backlinks to your site. If you do not know how to do this, a company called orlandosearchenginemarketing.com offers a local seo optimization that includes getting backlinks. Here are some local sites to get links from:

1. Chambers of commerce

2. any school websites (ask if they will give you a link for donation

3.Local business

4. Get links for networking groups if you are a part of them, exchanging links between network groups can be a great way to build links

5. Contact your local trade organization and ask if they have a directory on their website.

Don't forget to ask that they include your keywords in the link text when you ask them to link to you. Link text is how Google deciphers what the outside world thinks about your website.

Visit this link to download the local search seo checklist free.