However, the power of the Internet makes sure the competition is healthy. This means that a store that’s only a few miles from your store and is nearer to a major city doesn’t mean that it will be ranking higher than you. The only way this has any of affect at all is when your store is at a large distance, over 20 miles. Then in that case, the distance becomes a factor.

You might be surprised and at the same time happy to know that it doesn’t take anything different to boost your ranking in Local Google search, it’s pretty much the same. For example, the crucial aspects such as on page and off page SEO will still play a major role in the ranking of your website. If your locally targeted website contains content that’s SEO optimized with the right keyword density, then it will definitely be ranking higher than the others.

As with any regular search engine optimization, when you use the right keywords on your site, your rankings will dramatically improve in Google’s local searches. Just make sure your address appears at various places on your website, so that it can be crawled. Also have your city name inserted in important places such as the headings and of course, the title tags. When you do this, the chances of your site coming up when someone searches using your local keywords get strong.

If you’ve tried Google SEO for a while now, you know how much value Google gives to anchor text, so it’s important to have your related local keywords in your anchor text when linking to any external site that’s relevant (Example: SEO Services Tampa). Keep in mind that Google gives high emphasis to the position of the text appearing on the page. If all your targeted keywords are brought together and aren’t spaced out, it may affect your local ranking.

Finally, you also have to keep in mind what kind of rating your business has in the offline/real world. For instance, if you own a 5 star hotel, it will automatically be ranked higher than a 3 star hotel. That’s how Google works. All those sites that have a good reputation and a well known business are going to get a higher rank in Google local searches. Apart from this, manually adding your business to Google’s local search by going to their site is a good idea. This can give you a faster ranking. Remember, the longer your business stays on their listing, the higher it will be ranked. Businesses that aren’t long term and don’t stay around for long don’t get to rank well.

A leading online competitive intelligence service, Experian Hitwise accounced yesterday that Google accounted for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Nov. 28, 2009. Yahoo! Search received 15.39 percent, Microsoft’s Bing 9.34 percent and Ask.com received 2.65 percent. The remaining 52 search engines that were not explicitly named in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.07 percent of U.S. searches.

If you are interested in up-to-date analysis of online trends, you can visit the Hitwise Research Blog .

This table is not completely correct. The data is obviously a little slanted towards Google. It counts ALL traffic to Google, while it only counts a small portion to Yahoo. But even if that would be compensated, my guess is that Google still get over 50% of the US search traffic.

This picture is by the way completely different for other markets. In Japan for example the word Google is almost unknown. The market leader there is Yahoo, by far. So, if you want to reach somebody in Japan, you would focus your search engine optimization efforts on Yahoo.

There are also markets where basically only Google exists as far as search engines is concerned. One example of this would be France, where Google enjoys a whopping 91% market share.

Google’s market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%). Source: Google Blog.

For the US market you are, at least for the time being, save if you optimize for Google. The good thing: If you have optimized your web site for Google, you are already very close to a home run on Bing and Yahoo. The differences are not that big anymore.

SEO for Bing differs not that much from Google SEO or Yahoo SEO. Reducing SERP bounces is the most important on page factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as this factor monitors how good your content is. Or better how good your content matches the “ad”. The search engine listing is nothing more than an ad. If that ad matches what you deliver, you will have happy visitors that turn into customers.