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Local Internet Marketing

How to Register your Company for Local Discovery
Major Search Engines and Local Search Engine Optimization

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Why is local search important to your business? Local search is a recent trend in search marketing and the major search engine listing are FREE. According to recent estimates, 20 percent of all searches are locally oriented. As you probably know, Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have started their own local search services to attract people who use their PC instead of the yellow pages to find local services. A major research firm, The Kelsey Group, forecasts that the local search market will be worth over $4.0 billion. This is a huge opportunity for all small businesses with an Internet presence.

How do you optimize your web pages for local search? If you want to be found for local searches, you should include the name of your city and your region in the title tag of your web pages. If possible, include your full postal address in the footer of your web pages so that search engines can assign your web site to a special area.

Targeting Internet Yellow Pages

You can improve your chances of getting listed with the major local search engines by making sure your business and/or your web site is listed in the top /Internet/ Yellow Pages (IYP). The following table provides a list of top /Internet Yellow Pages/ in roughly their order of traffic density importance with the listing at no cost highlighted in yellow. In addition to getting listed, it's also important that your business information remains consistent throughout all of the IYP sites. Information consistency across IYP sites is crucial to the process of getting your business listed quickly and accurately in the major local search engines.

Internet Yellow Pages Registration

How To Check Your Listing

To check your listing, enter your business name and zip code into the search fields at the following locations (the minor search engines will show up if the business name is in the local yellow pages):