With the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing giving more credence to local businesses in the search results, it is imperative that a local business have an internet marketing plan that helps them compete in their local market place. With more than 50% of the searches done being local in nature and with consumers spending 80% of their income within 20 miles of their homes, it is more important than ever to have a solid and branded web presence.
Most business owners however, don't have a plan or strategy to promote their businesses online. They find it a daunting task and end up doing nothing. By doing this, they are giving up customers to their competitors that do have a web presence by default. The secret is to break it down into smaller more digestible chunks and attack it from there.
You first and foremost need a search engine friendly website that has good clean HTML and CSS coding. This means making use of writing proper title tags, descriptions of the pages and keywords. It also means employing the proper use of the H1 through H6 title tags having your keywords in those tags.
An overlooked strategy many times is the use of "alt" tags. These are the tags for images that describe that image being as the search engine crawlers cannot read images. It is important to tag every picture and use keywords in those tags when relevant.
It is also important to make the site easy to navigate by not only having clear navigation on the page but using anchor text also that links to other pages on and off your site. What makes the link valuable is the use of keywords that are relevant to the link as the anchor text. This is called deep linking and it ads value to your site by getting visitors to what they are looking for easily and quickly.
These simple steps can go along in making a huge difference in your sites rankings. For more help and assistance go to Reddoch Media Group. They can assist you with a local plan that will help you dominate your local niche market.
