SEO is the process of configuring a website so that it has a chance to show up in a search result for a particular keyword phrase. It is your way of telling search engines what you think your site is about. Each search engine has a slightly different formula for how they determine the results of a webpage.

Why is SEO Important?
One word sums it up – competition. As many as 20 billion web pages are being indexed at any given time. To stand out from the crowd, it is absolutely critical to make sure you are using every tool to make sure your customers can find you when they are looking for your products and services.

So why don’t more people do SEO?
SEO is a PROCESS, not a one-time event. It is detail oriented, time consuming and requires regular ongoing efforts in order to maintain results. SEO is one piece of a complete overall online marketing strategy.

Simple guidelines that you can control for best long-term SEO results:

• Good site structure – The bottom line is that if you can’t easily navigate a site without problems chances are the search engines can’t either and you have no chance of ranking for your key phrase.
• Good meta-data – Simply geek-speak for the code behind the scenes that search engines use to understand the web page.
• Good relevant content- Visitors understand that good relevant content is really what they are looking for when they searched with a keyword phrase.  Websites appear higher in the search results generally have regular updates or blogs versus sites with older, stale content on them.

Ranking with the search engines for local markets, requires a shift in marketing the big three search engines for global traffic. If your service is not global, then do not dilute your SEO efforts from targeted local online markets.

Your #1 goal is to use localized target keywords. Actual localized keywords will bring you a steady stream of natural traffic through local search.

Here are the steps involved for successful optimization in local markets.

1. Localize your target keywords. This includes prefixing or suffixing local terms, names, and names of areas, cities or zip codes with target keywords.

2. Make sure your website is submitted to local search engines, directories and web based yellow pages.

3. Display your mailing address with street address, zip code and complete. Once your site is indexed, these words gain prominence as a part of content.