Local SEO for your Website

Local SEO, What is that mean ?, simply you can say it as optimizing your website to a particular geographic location or a country. Is it worth ?, yes, it will worth a lot if your business is targeting to  local country or a particular city. SEO is the best way of improving on-page optimization, local search engine optimization will help you target your customers and deliver the highest performance. Google’s country-specific searches offer diverse rankings compared to Google.com, it is essential to know how to benefit from local search traffic.

Google index sites in the most appropriate index they have, thus a India-based website will be primarily indexed and ranked in the Google.co.in search results.

Local SEO Techniques :

Choosing a Local Top Level Domain (TLD) :

Arrange for local domains and local hosting, your top level domain name or your website hosting must be within the country only, means for example if your are in USA, you can choose your top level domain (TLD) .us, this just another way to show the search engine crawler that your website is targeted for local country.

The Second thing is your web hosting, your website hosting must be in within your country, check whether your service provider hosted your website in any USA data center or something, and tell them to change it to the local country data center. This will power up the task that your website is ready to show on local country search only.

Target Geo-Location in Google Webmasters Tool :

Google Webmasters is the best way to tell the Google bot that what it has to crawl and where it has to target, in the Google webmaster you can set the Geographic location target for the website. This is really a simple way you can target the local website for local search engines.

How set Geographic target for a website in Google Webmasters Tool :

1) Go to Site Settings.

2) Now select settings under site settings.

3) Check the box Target users in. And select the country you want to target.

4) Save the changes, you are done.

Correct the Language Issues :

In targeting different countries, you encounter the problem of mirror content when you simply put the same content to your websites located on different domains. You might think Web pages translated into different languages avoid the mirror content problem. In performing local optimization, you need to adhere to local approaches.

Local inbound links & Directory Submission :

Search engine spiders consider the inbound links that form your link profile. Inbound links from local TLDs will help you to get into the top results of local search engines. Try to gain links from local business partners, chambers of commerce, government agencies, suppliers, etc.

You can submit to some local directory websites like, Listings in the regional sections of the DMOZ, Yahoo, and BestOfTheWeb global directories will also help to improve local link popularity.

Submit to Google Places (former Local Business Center) :

Google Places, offers a free listing on Google maps. When potential customers search Google Maps for local information, they will easily find information about your business: your contact details, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop.

Google’s terms of service restrict any misrepresentations of your business in the listing – the business’ title should be a direct representation of its name. Well you can add its city, such as “Omni Hotel San Diego,” to help your ranking for regional searches.

This is all about How to do the Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, please let me know your comments and suggestions in the comment section below.

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Tags: seo, Technology, Tips

Category: Featured, SEO Tips, Tips, Tutorials, Webmaster Tools