Catch Elixir Systems on the Road at Search Engine Strategies

Elixir Systems will be on the road and reporting live from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose next week. Catch daily news, reports and photos from San Jose on the Elixir System’s Blog. Keep up to date with all the latest search engine developments to give your web site the competitive advantage by checking out our ‘Insights into Search for Business’ Blog on a daily basis.

Click here for a 20% off conference pass or FREE Expo pass for SES San Jose. (PDF)

Local Search for your Business

If your target market is on a local level your can use local search techniques to help develop your online business. Local search or geographically-based search revolves around keywords which include the desired neighborhood, towns, cities or other types of region.

SEO campaigns aimed at local markets generally are geared to develop and optimize individual site pages which are written to target the individual neighborhoods or regions.

For example if you owned a pizzeria in San Diego and you were trying to increase your business with a website there would be little to be gained by targeting a keyword such as ‘pizza.’ People from New York doing a search for ‘pizza’ and coming across your listing are not likely to travel to your restaurant or order a take out pizza from you. However if you were targeting the phrase ‘San Diego pizza’ you are more likely to gain potential business. People in San Diego may be willing to travel to your neighborhood for a good pizza. But say you want to increase your business in your neighborhood. You should then target a more localized keyword ‘Mission Beach Pizza.’ If your business includes delivery you could target a phrase ‘Mission Beach pizza delivery.’

The goal of local search is to capture local consumers to increase your local businesses. You should aim to have an individual page developed with unique text written for each geographic location that you are targeting with localized keywords. For optimum SEO purposes aim to have around 400-500 words of text on each page.

The great advantage of focusing on a localized search compaign is that it enables you to target consumers who are in your area and actively looking to buy your product. This is a great way to grow your online business.

You can comment on this article at the Elixir Systems SEO Blog

Questions and Answers From the Elixir Blog

Q: You mention "Don't keyword stuff hidden parts of the page - image 'alt'tags, comments, etc.", so can we use a phrase with keywords in it?

A: Keyword stuffing refers to the process of putting your keyphrase on the page dozens of times. If you do this the search engines will notice it and may see your page as spam.

By all means put your keyword in an image alt tag once, perhaps once per paragraph, headline (h1), footer, but try to limit it to that. In addition to search engine considerations, visually impaired visitors with screen readers will hear your keyphrase repeated as often as you've repeated it on the page - try listening to your keyword read out... repeatedly...again and again...

Let me give an example of keyword stuffing:

Alternatively if I was targeting that phrase I could write

Paragraph one is obviously keyword stuffed, two isn't and the use of keyword stemming (the use of optimize instead of optimization) makes it seem more natural - and that's what the search engines are looking for.

You can comment on this Q&A at the Elixir Systems SEO Blog

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