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Add Your Website to Local Search

If you are having a hard time targeting your keyword on the major search engines such as Google, Microsoft Bing or Yahoo, consider submitting to their local search categories.

A local search would be something like this on Google

I search for the term "thai restaurant, vancouver, bc" and Google returns a local map of Vancouver with Thai restaurants including their telephone numbers. As you can see, these rank higher than the normal search results.

To get listed in this category, you can register your website by going to the following URLs:

Google Local Business Listing Signup

Bing Local Listing Center

Yahoo Local Listings

Unfortunately, Google is the only one out of the three that accepts businesses in Canada. However, if you have a business located in USA, you can register those websites into Microsoft and Yahoo.
They verifiy your business by calling your business telephone and an automated voice will give you a code that you enter on their website or they sms the code to another number.
Microsoft and Yahoo will send you a postcard with details on how to verify your information.

Besides adding your listing to local search, you can also geotag your pages.

For example, our company, Canadian Web Hosting is located at latitude 49.169499 and longitude -123.137040 in Richmond, BC.

Below is the meta information you would add in the section of your pages:

<meta name="geo.position" content="49.169499;-123.137040">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Canadian Web Hosting, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada">
<meta name="geo.region" content="CA-BC">

Be sure and use upper case for the geo.region country and state abbreviation.

You can use Google Earth to find the longitude and latitude of your location.  Just navigate to the location in Google Earth and place the cursor over the correct location, at the bottom of the program screen you'll see the latitude and longitude displayed.

To view the latitude and longitude in decimal degrees on Google Earth, go to Tools > Options > and select Decimal Degrees, then Ok. Once you've changed this setting, the latitude and longitude information will be shown in decimal format needed for your meta tags.

Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/