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Web is going local - webmasters are working hard to improve their search engine ranking around specific geographical location for better business. Especially, this is a big boon for local service providers like a lawyer or a local grocery shop. The recent hike in oil price has turned people to online shopping in bigger number :)

Here are ten tips on how to optimize your website to improve your local rankings in Google:

1. Book a country specific TLD. .com TLDs are good from user’s perspective but .fr is a better option for Google bot to understand your geo-location.
2. Host your domain in your own country. Google tracks IP location to determine the ranking of a website for local search.
3. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tool and set your preferred geo location [tools > overview > Set geographic target]. This would give a clear indication to Google Bot about what you actually want. This is more important if you are using .com or .org TLDs and want to target some other country but USA. However, I would still prefer a country specific TLD, if you are sure about targeting a specific geographical niche. But in that case, you might not get the opportunity of going global with your domain.
4. Submit your site to Google Local Business Center and also submit your site to other local directories like yelp (if you are from San Francisco). You should also look for local business listings, Google Base and others.
5. Publish your address in the contact page along with a Google map showing the exact location of your office or business center.
6. Promote your blog or site in your locality. If your local newspaper has an online publication, try to get a link from there.
7. Influence people to visit your website directly via Ads and other methods - if people from a distinct place visit a website directly in huge numbers, it would send a clear sign to search engine about the relevance.
8. Get links from websites with same TLDs. For example, if your TLD is .fr, get links from as many .fr sites as possible.
9. Use the name of your locality along with the main key phrase as anchor texts for incoming links. For example, if you are a Florida based SEO Company and if you want to optimize your website around Florida, use keywords like Florida SEO or SEO Florida. However, do not overdo it.
10. Optimize page content around your locality.

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