In a recent article on Search Engine Journal, Ryan Caldwell offered three keys to success with local search.

1. Anchor Text and Authority — get links from authoritative local sites, and make sure the anchor text (the clickable text of the link) contains keywords and, if possible, a geographic reference.
2. Local Links — see what local sites are linking to your local competitors and get links form those same sites.Ryan also recommends you get links from DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW and Business.com.
3. Local Citations — these are like little testimonials, and they can help alot.  Ryan suggests getting people to give you citations at places like Google’s Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, Yelp, SuperPages and infoUSA.

If you own a local business, it’s important to show up in the local search engine listings. And Google Local gets the most traffic.

Actually, Google Local is part of Google Maps at www.maps.google.com. And Google has some quality guidelines that will make your listings better and hopefully improve your visibility. The full story from Google is here. But these are the salient points:

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• List information that provides as direct a path to the business as you can. Given the choice, you may want to list individual location phone numbers over a central phone line, official website pages rather than a directory page, and as exact of an address as you can.
• Only include listings for businesses that you represent.
• Don’t participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title or address fields.

For details on how to add your site to Google Local, Yahoo Local, and MSN/Live Local, see our earlier blog post here.

If you serve a specific geographic area, like Connecticut, or Boston, or Northern New Jersey, you need to be listed prominently in the major local search engines. Here’s how to do that:

Google Local is actually located at maps.google.com. Yahoo Local is located at local.yahoo.com. And MSN/Live local is located atmaps.live.com. (now it’s bing.com/maps)

Go to each of them and follow these instructions:

Do a search for your company name plus your actual address. For example, search for Skillman Doors, Bloomfield NJ or Total Image Consultants, Boston MA. That ought to bring up your listing, if it exists.

If it’s not there, look for a way to add your listing.
• In Google Local, the link is in a section headlined Can’t find what you’re looking for? And says add a place to the map
• In Yahoo Local, the link is at the very bottom under Local Resources and it says Add a Business
• In Live Local the link is near the bottom left corner of the page in gray type and quite small – you really have to look for it. It says To add or edit your business listing, use the Local Listing Center.

Once you’re at the Add Listing page, enter all the information requested and submit or enter.

But Wait! You’re Not Done!

All three of these local search sites have an option for customers to rate businesses. The more ratings you have, and the better they are, the more prominent you may be listed. Don’t overdo it or try to fake out the search engines by logging in as fictitious customers. The search engines are wise to those tricks and you could find yourself severely penalized.

However, do ask some of your best customers if they would be willing to give you a rating in one or another of these local search engines. Typically there’s a link right next to your listing for them to use. Tell them where to go and how to look you up. And ask them if they would write something nice about you.

After a few weeks, check back in to local search and search for yourself by keyword instead of by your company name – such aslawyers East Hanover NJ or fashion stylist Boston MA. Over time, you should see your visibility improve.

Local search is a critical part of marketing a small business, especially so-called “brick and mortar” that rely on people physically stopping in at the businesses location. In Google, local search is found atwww.local.google.com or www.maps.google.com. In Yahoo, it’s at www.local.yahoo.com. And on MSN/Live, it’s atwww.local.live.com or www.maps.live.com.

Small Business Newz has a brief article on how to make sure you can be found in local search. As valuable as the article itself are the reader comments you’ll find right below the article.

Local search may be used by going to local.google.com or local.yahoo.com or local.live.com. More commonly, if you search for a business and include a town or zip code in your search, you’ll find “local results” at the top of the listings. Showing up there is a little different from showing up high in the normal rankings.

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, the Local Search Marketing Tactics session presented some concrete steps to improve organic local search results. Here are the headlines, but check out the article on Search Engine Watch for the details.

8 Ways to Improve Your Local Search Results

1. Make sure that you have a crawler friendly web site
2. Include your business address twice on the page
3. Check out your business listing on the major search engines
4. Get your business rated
5. Solicit local links
6. Check out your competition
7. Verify directory information
8. Create separate web pages for different cities/regions

A recent survey by ComScore found that 47% of people doing a local search on the Internet visited a local merchant as a result of their search while 41% made contact offline. More than a third (37%) made contact online as the result of a local search.

Some More Statistics

• 63% of US Internet users (~109 million people) performed a local search in July 2006.
• 36% of those searches were in Google, followed by Yahoo! (29%) and MSN/Live (12%)
• Almost 60% of local searchers were looking for a restaurant or something entertainment related like a movie or sightseeing attraction.
• 52% were specifically searching for a business phone number or address.
• 41% were looking for information on a local service in their neighborhood like a dry cleaner, pharmacy or car rental.

Increasingly clients are asking us how to submit their businesses to local search engines, online Yellow Pages and local social networks. And updating or correcting wrong entries is another problem often encountered. Local search is relatively new, and it can be an important traffic stream for your web site. We’ve written about it recently in our blog.

Sometimes this isn’t easy to figure out, For some sites you can do it online, but in other cases you may  need to contact the core data provider of the site in question.

A blogger has compiled an extensive resource list of information on local search and how to make sure your business is listed locally. Check it out.

In the High Rankings Forum, a reader recently inquired, “I know this is a rather new topic in the world of SEO but is there anyway to increase your ranking on a local listing? For example when searching tree service in Berkeley, CA it displays the first 3 companies on the main search page. How is the ranking on these tree companies determined? I’d like to increase my companies ranking within these local results.”

Read the full thread for some interesting insights and tips on how to make sure you’re visible in local search results.

The Role of Search in Consumer Buying” is a new study by comScore, commissioned by Google. They examined the search behavior of 83 million Americans who conducted over 552 million searches within 11 product categories using one or more of the 24 top search engines. Some interesting results:

• 25% purchased an item directly related to their search query
• 37% completed their purchase online
• 63% completed their purchase in an off-line retail store

Moral of the story: local retail stores can no longer afford to ignore the impact of the Internet. No matter how local your establishment, and no matter how narrow your market, customers are looking for you and your products online. If they can’t find you in the search engines, which of your competitors do they find? It’s easy for you to test out.

There’s a new local search engine available. TrueLocal announced the launch of www.TrueLocal.com, a search engine that specializes in providing users with search results for local brick and mortar businesses.

A search for Pizza in East Hanover, NJ lists a bunch of chain pizza shops with featured (paid!) listings up to 12 miles away before it began to list local pizzerias. And even then it only lists three of the six pizzerias in town. And it misses my favorite, Godfather Pizzeria!

But it’s brand new, so let’s give it a chance. Try it and see how it works for local searches in your neck of the woods.