Local Business Search Engine Optimization - How To Get On Google's Page One

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If a poll were conducted among active Internet web site owners today, most would vote for the premise that it is next to impossible to get your site ranked on Google's page one.

You know the drill. You do your on-site search engine optimization, get your back links, make sure your content is relevant; and you still land on Google page 458, or worse. Google is Google, and if you are not one of the "Big Boys" you just are not going to show up on the first page. Right?

Absolutely, positively, wrong! For small businesses that market in a defined local area (a city, county, or even a state getting high page rank on Google is not that hard.

I will get to the magic bullet in a moment. But first please understand you still have to go through the same on-page SEO that you would do if you optimized any site, anywhere. Local, National, International; that part does not change. How to get on Google Good optimization technique is demanded under any circumstance. Without going into detail about that here, just understand that you have to pay attention to your Tags, Content and Links. You can find out exactly how to do ...
... that everywhere on the Internet, if you don't already know.

Now, for local business the key to the Search Engine Optimization Kingdom is in the acquisition of the perfect unbelievable domain name. To get a domain name that otherwise would not be available, and point you to a page-one ranking almost by default, simply add the name of your city, county or state to a top ranking keyword for your business.

For example, I built a couple of web sites for a client who was in the "Senior Housing" business in Houston, Texas. His old web sites were nothing more than post cards and the domain names were the names of his projects. That made sense to him, but in that case for you to find his old web sites you had to know the name of his business which had nothing to do with "Senior Housing". Google advertising the old web sites were okay enough, but way off the optimization mark, and in SEO purgatory when it came to actually being found by what people were in fact searching for; i.e., "senior housing in Houston."

I'm sure you have seen dot com URL's like: JoesBestBarbeque, or BreaksAndMore, or..., well, you get the idea. "Barbeque," "Breaks," and "Senior Housing" are keywords for which you would never get ranked unless you spent a million dollars, and I am not sure you would make it even then.

What we did was look for high ranking keywords in my client's case, "senior housing" and simply added "Houston." That gave us SeniorHousingHouston, a dot com domain name that was available, and one that has consistently ranked on page one of Google since about the second week after we launched the new website.