Hi, I'm thinking of starting a localized site and I'd like some feedback from people who have truly local sites (like restaraunt reviews, LOCAL business directories or even personals sites). Is Google smart enough to pick up on the words Smalltown, Midwesternstate on my site and consider it a local site? How about adwords targeting, provided there were publishers, are there any hidden meta tags I can put to give bots the clue that I'm targetting locally? Also, is there any way to use the API key for localized results? I'm going to integrate Google Maps for driving directions, what a cool feature that is! Thanks for any ideas or experiences!
Get your geo/location in the meta tags title and in the first paragraph and H titles for the site and important pages. Get your address in the site or geo description, smalltown, kentucky, etc. Get the address on the bottom of all pages. Sprinkle the geo information througout w/out being spammy. In February of this year, G became much more geo oriented. For directions, instead of using an automated system write directions from all over the area. For instance if your web site is about chocoholic factory smalltown kentucky, have driving directions from east, west, north, and south. For instance (from the North) Big Town, Not so big town, Fatburg, Sweetville, Kentucky, take Rte 201 etc. You will then start getting picked up for not only your town but for searches like big town kentucky chocoholic factory, chocoholic factory sweetville, etc. Definately get a fair amount of geo content into content, title meta tags and titles and you will be picked up on a geo basis in the engines. Dave
Good advice dave, Google Maps is great to use as a link, because users can print map, and you are linking to a high PR site... D