Many businesses and services are either country or more often, region specific. You may only be interested in local traffic if you have a shop or deliver products locally or perhaps prefer to meet up with your customers and prospects. In which case, you will want to optimise your website to attract the local traffic. Jaydip Parikh has 4 useful tips on how to optimise your site for local search. I didn’t know you could geo-tag your website.
With all the discussion and focus these days on getting inbound links to rank your site in the search engines, have outbound links been forgotten? Do we need them? I think we do. Darren Rowse thinks we do and makes a good case in outbound links – an endangered species? I do it for three reasons; out of courtsey to the orginator of the content , it adds value for the reader and outbound links do still, indirectly, help your website’s search engine optimisation.
While reading questions and listening to the debate from webmasters, there is still confusion around the use of meta tags, and whether google uses them to rank your website. Well, it official. The answer is no. Google ignores them. An article from webmaster central blog states google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. There is also a video to explain why.
Google maps have recently introduced place pages, which adds more details, especially useful for local business searches. Google say the enhancements are not for the benefit of local business, but Greg Sterling doesn’t agree and thinks it will help local search in his recent article. Going local has got to be the next wave for search. There are millions of searchers and small businesses around the globe that will benefit. I think google will support it.
If you have a country or regional business or service, local search is important.
