I'm curious to know if anyone has found any successful methods of indicating a business's location that is recognized by any of the major search engines. While searching this morning, I came across a meta tag scheme that is new to me: http://technogeekery.blogspot.com/2005/04/geographic-meta-tags-let-people-know.html Mostly, I'm just looking for an effective way to properly regionalize my sites. I feel like I'm stuck in that position of having to insert the city name in weird places in the title and body. I don't feel that I'm going overboard on this, because I'm wary of being penalized for over-optimizing my sites. However, some of the text does border on reading somewhat strangely from the site visitor's perspective, and I'm trying to figure out a good way to avoid this. Also, I'd like to mention that some small businesses have more than one location, and we are frequently faced with the decision of choosing just one location to promote. My initial thoughts on the meta tag item mentioned above is that for a business with three locations, I would be able to indicate the three different cities on a contact/map/directions page. Of course, this all hinges on whether or not the tags will even be looked at. Any suggestions welcome!
If you are a brick-n-mortar business, I wouldn't see it a bad thing to add your address at the bottom of your pages, along with 800 #, etc... You might want to check this out about getting included into Google Local - https://www.google.com/local/add/login
I can't help with any unique tricks on geo-targeting specific pages/sub-sites... but I can list some of the standard SEO stuff I've done. This was for a regional service, targeting major metro and surrounding areas. I.E. People usually searched the service using metro/state + keywords. Examples: atlanta <keywords>, atlanta ga <keywords>, georgia <keywords>, etc. From our main site, we create sub-sites for each metro area where most of our content was maintained. That was the nature of our business so it may not apply directly to your situation. Each city/metro targeted site was content heavy and meta heavy for that particular area (standard SEO). We also formed local partnerships with many other businesses and had them link directly to the applicable city sub-site. For each targeted geo we ran regional keyword campaigns on google using combinations as described above (more info in this thread and info to a great regional keyword tool by member conciseusa).
Most USA local search stuff try to extract addresses, zip codes and area codes. You also may want to read http://www.gigablast.com/tagsdemo.html
Our search engine promotion strategy is geared to be as far reaching as we can manage within budget, meaning that we do submit to second tier search engines and directories (such as Gigablast, thanks for the link jbw). We have clients nationwide, and each of those clients has the need to prioritize local promotion. Techbuzz, we can’t do exactly the same thing that you are doing, as it wouldn’t lend itself to our main site very well. For the time being, we are stuck with optimization efforts limited to the site code of each client site. I know there are many other businesses with similar problems. From a copywriting standpoint, the SEO challenge is quite high. A well-optimized site usually ends up sounding really odd to the visitor: “Our company specializes in Chicago widgets for the discerning homeowner. Each of our Chicago widgets are completely customized for a unique look and high esthetic appeal. Please call us for more information about our Chicago widgets.†Some areas are so competitive that this is what the text ends up looking like in order to please the three big hitters. Unfortunately, once you get up in the SERPS, no one wants to buy your widgets, cause it sounds like your business couldn’t afford to hire a decent copywriter. Being number 1 is no good if you can’t convert, or if your conversion is too low to justify the cost of promotion. It would be better to have a paragraph formatted like this: “Our company specializes in widgets for the discerning Chicago homeowner. Each of our widgets are completely custom made at our Chicago office for a unique look and high esthetic appeal. Please call us for more information about our widgets, and join our other satisfied customers in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.†Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work, because the keyword phrase is broken up. We continue to play with different scenarios, but I’m hoping some other development might allow us to back off on what I think is over optimization of the readable content. I think any alternatives at this point would be great, so I don’t have to kill our content with SEO. That is primarily why I was hoping the geotagging would catch on.