Local search engine optimization has been around for a long time now. Here are some tips to help you better leverage the local searches in your area so that you can have better profits.

Your site should always have content that is interesting and useful to visitors. Why do you want to optimize your site with the search engines? Your main purpose is to get quality website visitors. So if you want people to visit your site and actually stay there or buy your product, then you should have relevant information that they would be interested to read. Most of the people who will visit your site won't be reading all of your content on the website, but they will simply go through it or scan it. So if you want to be sure that people read certain information, highlight it or use bullet points to call their attention to it. You can even use pictures as an aid to achieve this. One thing to watch out for is overusing keywords, as this can work against you for SEO purposes.

The major search engines run local listing services like Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local, and claiming your profile is the first thing to do when visiting these sites. Each of these sites has a fairly straightforward verification process to claim your profile, and all you have to do is complete some boxes and verify your address and phone number. Many businesses never think to do this, so it's a simple way to give you an advantage in your marketing efforts. Another way to easily improve your image in the minds of search engine users is to simply post pictures of you or your business to local site listings, as this makes you seem more open and honest. So to make sure this process goes smooth and people see good, worthy pictures, upload a few from your site. While these don't have to be professional quality photographs, you do want them to reflect well on your business, so they should be fairly good.

You should also try to get listed with all those directories that are the Yellow Pages on the web. You can start off with some of these sites such as YellowBook.com, YelloPages.com and SuperPages.com. YellowPages.com, for example, offers businesses free listings online and they get more than one hundred million searches every month. On the other hand SuperPages.com supplies its listing to big portals such as About.com and MSN. You can have a very basic listing with them for free.

All in all, you can go far if you use these SEO techniques, but you must do them correctly if you hope for them to work.