If you have a local, offline business, you want to be well ranked in the search engine so you get local traffic. Given below are a few local SEO tips that will help you on your way to higher rankings.

One of the best ways to capitalize on the growing local search numbers is to list yourself with the big wigs of the industry. This refers to Google Maps and Yahoo! Local. These are the two big wigs that you'll want to list with first before you go on to anything else. The idea is that, by listing with these names, you'll get more traffic from the search engines than you'll know what to do with. Getting Google Maps to list you is actually quite simple. You just need to follow a simple process to complete the application, after which you will be either emailed or telephoned for the verification purposes. Once you're verified, all it takes is a short waiting period of a few weeks for you to see yourself listed in the local searches. Yahoo! is the same way, only verification isn't necessary. Yahoo! allows you to fully customize your listing any way you wish.

Yahoo! seems to approve you much quicker than Google, which is a good thing. Whatever you do, just make sure you don't ignore this simple tip because it will take you a long way in your goal to reach out to the local audience. One of the most overlooked local SEO techniques is to make sure that your ads mention all of the places in which your business operates. In other words, you should let the search engines know about the other cities, counties and/or states that you're serving. How will you do this well? If you just make a bullet list of places your ads won't get a lot of attention from the search engines but if you mention them within the context of your content you should do okay. The reason for this is, you're helping the search engines get more data about your activities and in what areas you're functioning. This plays some role in helping you with your local SEO efforts. What you need to remember is that even though these tips seem very simple, your local SEO efforts will be aided a great deal by making sure these tips get applied to your campaigns.

Try to diversify your anchor text. Every SEO marketer understands that having long tail keywords is valuable and having them in place can help you better rank your business in the search engines; when you use local SEO that's exactly what you are trying to do. This will give you the opportunity to work with the different anchor texts and that means that you should try to have a large variety of diversified anchor text to expand your reach. For instance, let's suppose you have a local chocolate store, don't just optimize for "New York Chocolate Store". Be creative--there are other options available to you like "Chocolate Stores in Manhattan, New York" and "Chocolate Store in New York." Whatever you do, just remember that the search engines highly value the anchor text, which means you should try and put in as many variations as possible to increase your rankings. To conclude: local SEO is the way you need to go if you want to get more exposure.