You can have a great website optimized for your type of business with lots of great representative keywords and anchor text but does general search optimization really do you that much good when your primary source of new customers is local.

If a potential customer were to search for "electrician raleigh nc", The businesses are listed according to which is the closest to the center of the town. In fact some of the businesses located closer to the center of town than you could have a terrible website or no website at all! If you are located in the outskirts local search can be a bit frustrating.

So, what can you do to get a higher rank on the results pages for local search? Try this handy checklist as a guide to get started:

Optimize your local directory listings with Google, Yahoo, Bing

• Make sure to use keywords in the description.
• If possible, modify the company name to include keywords (instead of Richard & Sons make it Richard & Sons Plumbing" so it shows up for "plumbing" + location.
• Ask your satisfied customers to write up a quick testimonial on your Google, Yahoo, Bing listings. the more reviews you have on your local listings the better you will rank.
• Add media to your listing such as video, photos, coupons as well.

Optimization your website for local search

• Make sure you have your physical address in text on your website, place it on every page that is appropriate.
• Write blog posts or add supplemental pages on your site that incorporate the locations of nearby suburbs or cities. You may start out with Plumbing, Raleigh but also have sub pages for Plumbing, Cary or Plumbing, Apex.
• Add geo tagging to your site's meta tags. Geo-tags are little known to most but are expected to have increasing importance due to the increase in GPS use by the average person on the street.
• Include your address in your title tags.
• Include your address in your meta description.

Optimize your links for local search

• Seek out links from website that are also located in your city or geographic area.
• Register with authority sites such as the Chamber of Commerce, Yellowpages.com , Yelp etc. You may not get a link but you usually get a "citation". These citations are not backlinks to your website, they are simply content on pages that connect you to a locality. Most likely because of the regional authority of the site you are mentioned on or having local city names located on the same page as the mention of your name. The more citations you have the better you will rank for your competitive locality.
• Consider where your website domain name is registered. If you are in the U.S. make sure your domain is purchased through a U.S. company.
• Consider where your website is hosted. try to locate in the geographic you are targeting or at least the same country.