subject: Local Seo Is Easy: Follow This Simple Beginner's Guide [print this page] One of the simplest SEO tips that you can take home is creating optimized local classified listings. This is a simple way to take advantage of local search efforts because the big search engines really like those kinds of sites and the more you use them the more likely it is that you can send targeted local traffic to your business's website. Craigslist should be your starting point because it is the most popular of all of the classified websites. Posting SEO'd ads on Craigslist regularly is something that you need to do.
Your ads need to be targeted specifically for your market. Be careful not to make your ad garish--simple is best. When you write the ad, focus on the title because this is what increases most of the response. Your title needs to have your city, state and keyword phrase in it. It could be helpful to write your ad for Craigslist the same way that you would write a landing page for your business because, often, the ads for websites will outrank the sites themselves in search engine results.
A smart strategy for your Craigslist ad is to use it as a means for sending very targeted traffic to your website, which should be your main goal. Besides that, there is also USFreeAds: it does not work as well as Craigslist but it can still provide you with a great response since it is a well ranked classified site. What you need to do is send traffic specifically to your best offer through these classifieds sites (though piggy backing off of those sites traffic is also an option).
Another local SEO strategy that generally gets ignored is that you should try and mention all the other locations that you're serving in. You should write out every state, county and town that your business operates within. How can you accomplish this? By simply listing out all the cities in your area in bullet points won't give you great results, but when you mention them in line with your sites content, it will make a difference. The main reason for this is that you give the search engines more data so that they have an easier time of pinpointing your business activities and locations. This plays some role in helping you with your local SEO efforts. What you need to remember is that even though these tips seem very simple, your local SEO efforts will be aided a great deal by making sure these tips get applied to your campaigns.
It is also very smart to work on getting your company listed in the Yellow Pages directory (and other directories like it). YellowPages.com, YellowBook.com and SuperPages.com are all great directories to start out with. You should know that YellowPages.com gets more than 100 local searches every month and it offers free listings for business owners. On the other hand SuperPages.com supplies its listing to big portals such as About.com and MSN. You can have a very basic listing with them for free.
You now have a number of effective methods to get quality local traffic. The above techniques work quite well for optimizing your site for local traffic.
