The web is global and has really expanded the reach of many businesses, and search engines are a great tool to give them exposure in the world marketplace.  However, a lot of folks don't realize that these same engines are an excellent way to reach those customers and clients that are just around the corner.  It's also a lot easier to achieve visibility locally than to compete for good search engine placement against business worldwide.  Even if you provide your products and services worldwide, don't forget to reach out to those a little more close to home.  Here's some tips to help you succeed with local search.

• Get Listed
  
  The big search engines all provide tools to allow you to submit your business details to be included in their local search indexes with plenty of detail.  In addition to your just your website and business name, you can include your address and phone (obviously) as well as business category, hours of operation, accepted forms of payment, an image of your business, if free or paid parking is available and other relevant information.  After providing your business details, you will generally be required to verify that you are the owner (or a representative of the business).  This may be done by mail, email or phone, and varies depending on the search engine.  You should start by submitting your site to the following local search services:
  
  www.google.com/local/add
  listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit
  ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx
  biz.yelp.com/signup
  
  Also, google shows listings from other local search services (like yahoo, yelp and others as shown below), so if you want to try to increase your market share, it helps to list your business in a variety of sources.




• GeoTag Your Site
  
  In your HTML, you can place some tags in the header to help the search engines know where your site is located.  This is done by setting up Geotags, and it's a pretty simple process.  GeoTags look something like this:
  
  
  [ code ]

  <meta name="geo.position" content="35.644707, -97.545419">
  <meta name="geo.placename" content="Travis Langley & Associates, Edmond, Oklahoma, United States">
  <meta name="geo.region" content="US-OK">
  
  
  If you need to convert and address to lattitude and longitude for the geo.position tag, try mygeoposition.com.

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Check back soon for part 2 of this article.  It's late -  I'm off to bed...