SEO tips for local business People who are local SEO professionals; this post is for you. I want to suggest you some tricks that I used and it helped me a lot. You too can take advantage of the same, and benefit. You should either have a domain containing main keyword or select a local domain name. Try to add city name and surrounding cities in the metas. Have a content and inner linking mentioning the city location and surrounding cities. You must have sub-page content with zip codes; drip links; Google & Yahoo maplinks. Also, you can link your keyword with the physical address. You can even put your site on some review sites. With this, you can come on the first page.
This kind of technique will be only useful if we are working for our own website, we can only do experiments on our own property, BUT the third person who is working with us will not allow to do experiments which might hurt his website. BUT Though, its nice tips.
Example is (random) lincoln city hotels for the site thecoholodge.com. You see? you only use lincoln city as some kind of prefix for the keyword hotels. If you only use hotels without lincoln city, you will really find it hard to get on top of the search engines as you will be facing a stronger competition. That's applicable for local businesses only. Another example that I can give is martial arts chicago for the site go4martialarts.com. If we are going to take a closer look to the two sites, the url of thecoholodge.com does not contain any of the terms in the keyword while that of the second contains the keyword only that it attaches the word chicago on it. This technique would be very useful to rank for a keyword in a particular geographical location.
A web page that has been validated to a W3C standard contains no errors and therefore can be easily parsed and understood by the search engine crawlers. I don't think so validation helps you ranking. But it is a bit important.
This is really a great tips and completely new to me. I never come across such things before. I really appreciate your time and efforts that you shared your experience with us.