Barton Consulting

Like it or not, Google ranks content in the search engines based on the number of inbound links to a website. Because of this, ranking high in the search engines (Google in particular) is a popularity contest. [Insert Flashbacks of Highschool Here]. Makes sense, if something is more liked by more people, it should be ranked higher. The drawback is, that this encourages Search Engine Spam (spam bots, paid links, fake blog posts, etc).

For small and medium sized businesses this makes ranking high in the search engines rather difficult. Because your competing with the entire world for keywords for a local market. Which could be a good thing, if you can rank high in the global market, offering products and services that are easily exported, you can increase your revenues exponentially.

But what if you only want to stay local. How can you optimize your web site for Google Local Search? It’s all about the keywords, and the link context.

Let’s say your a Graphics Designer, and you specialize in making Websites for people in your local area. Graphics Designer is going to be a very difficult keyword to rank high for. Especially if your just starting out today. There are hundreds if not thousands of Graphics Designer websites out there on the web. You’re competing with some power house companies located in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, etc with an already large client base. For someone located in Idaho Falls that will make it very difficult for you to rank high for the keyword Graphics Designer. What you can do though, is focus on the keyword Idaho Falls Graphics Designer. There are a lot less Graphics Designers in Idaho Falls than there are in Chicago, or Los Angeles.

So once you decide the keyword(s) your going to focus on, You need to start getting others to link back to your website, with those keywords in the text of an anchor tag. This is the links context.

We all understand that the standard anchor tag is <a>. The text between the beginning <a> and ending </a> is the Link Context.

So if your website is http://barsult.com (funny, mine is), you’ll want an anchor tag like this for Idaho Falls Graphics Designer. <a href=”http://barsult.com” title=”Idaho Falls Graphics Designer”>Idaho Falls Graphics Designer</a>. Notice the title and href attributes. Don’t forget them.

Most people tend to set the Link context as the name of your company. Unless the name of your company has the keywords you want in it, this is usually not a good idea. Use the text outside of the anchor tag to mention the name of your company.

Here’s an example:

Barton Consulting, LLC an Idaho Falls Graphic Designer has graphics designers that have been creating websites since 1998.

Now go out and get others to link back to your website properly. Just remember, there are fewer people searching for Idaho Falls Graphic Designer than there are searching for Graphics Designer. So you’ll probably want to target more than just one city. Around Idaho, you’ll probably want to target Rexburg Graphics Designer, Rigby Graphics Designer, Boise Graphics Designer, Twin Falls Graphics Designer, and Pocatello Graphics Designer.

You’ll obviously know what cities to target in your area. The good thing/bad thing, depending on how you look at it, is that Google knows where the websites are that think back. Google can recognize which ones are really located in the area you’re searching for. So a link from an Idaho Falls Hospital is going to help you better than some random website in the United Kingdom.