What does it take in terms of local internet marketing and SEO to get your website to the top of search engine results? Although there’s no magic formula and the algorithms used by Google and other major search engines tend to vary frequently, there are still some sound principles that will help your website achieve higher rankings. Let’s take a look.

Local Internet Marketing

In order to get your website added to various search engine maps and geo-location shopping sites, you need to make sure that it includes a physical address and phone number. This is easily accomplished by adding a Contact Us page with a handy map of your location in addition to a mailing address, phone number(s), fax number and email address. But don’t just stop there; you may want to include a footer on each page that lists your local phone number and address so it can easily be found by spiders crawling your pages.

URL Registration

Registering your domain name for at least five years and preferably ten is a good way to achieve higher search engine rankings. Any less than five years and your website doesn’t appear to be as good a prospect in terms of longevity. Sure, it may cost you more money upfront to register your URL for that long, but it’s a solid investment.

Brand Advertising

Another thing search engines love is to see your brand mentioned all over the Internet. A good way to do this is by using social media and video content, which tends to spread virally. Of course, you have to create your brand first and then build on its recognition, so this isn’t a quick SEO fix. But it is one that will put your company in good stead as far as local internet marketing and even offline marketing that results in increased sales.

How These SEO Factors Help

Why do a local address and phone number, a five-year domain registration, and broad brand advertising help your website in terms of SEO? The main reason is that all of these factors indicate that your business has staying power. It shows that you, as the company owner, are committed to making your mark on the Internet.

The second reason this is good SEO is because each of these things costs money. When you spend the money to solidly establish your business, search engines know you stand to lose a lot if it suddenly folds. Your website gets higher ranking simply because the pages are of good quality – and that’s what people want to see when they search for a company like yours.

Of course, it makes sense in financial terms for the search engines, too. They get more money on their bottom line from advertising and other ancillary services when their results are relevant and trustworthy. By helping your business establish a presence online, Google, Bing and Yahoo are essentially earning royalties via your branding and local internet marketing efforts. Eventually they might not place such an emphasis on having a physical location, but for now, at least in the short term, your online business benefits from geo signals you provide to the search engines.

There are many ways to make local internet marketing work with SEO principles in order to get your business website noticed. Try including these three key factors in your local internet marketing campaign and see what a difference it makes in regards to search engine results ranking.