Don’t you hate it when another blogger beats you to the punch on writing about a good idea? Well, Steve McStud Espinosa kicked my butt this morning with his post, Take Advantage of Trusted Sources – Local Search Tactics. In the post Steve talks about how to link to other webpages that the search engines trust to boost your presence in the SERPs. Here’s a summary of how it works:

1. Link to the Yahoo Local page for your business with your target keywords in the anchor text like this: Tri Valley SEO

2. Since the Yahoo Local page is already indexed in Google this should help push it up in Google for the targeted term – assuming your own site has at least a little authority in Google.

3. Link to your profile pages from other IYP sites (e.g. Yellowbook, Kudzu, CitySquares, etc.) that have your profiles indexed in Google and Yahoo with variations of the target keywords in the anchor text.

4. If you see a SERP from another search engine or IYP ranking well for a particular search (e.g. a Yahoo Local page that ranks well in Google Web results) then optimize your listing for that search engine (e.g. add your biz to the YLocal category that’s showing up in Google, if relevant).

And that’s the trick.

For the full explanation with pretty pictures check out Steve’s post.

For more tricky linking ideas check out my post on how to boost your rankings in Google using internal links.

Share This Story!

About Author

13 Response Comments

  • Bill G  May 27, 2008 at 6:10 pm

    Andrew high quality find indeed. I would have never thought of that. Keep up the good work!

    Regards,

    Bill

  • Steve McStud  May 27, 2008 at 9:00 pm

    LOL, this post already ranks for Tri Valley SEO in Google.

  • Andrew Shotland  May 27, 2008 at 9:29 pm

    Sort of was supposed to work the other way. Ah well. Readers, take everything I say with a huge grain of NaCL.

  • Don Campbell  May 28, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    Great tip, as usual Andrew. I plan to put this to work. Thanks!

  • peter caputa  May 28, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    This is good stuff. I’ve employed this quite a bit and advise my local clients to do the same.

    The only thing to be cautious of: make sure this site doesn’t outrank you for the keyword you’re targeting for your site. If your site already ranks fairly high for the keyword you’re targeting, you certainly don’t want your yahoo, merchantcircle, IYP listing to outrank you. However, if it’s a keyword that might be too difficult to rank for – for your own site – this is a good strategy.

    But, someone who doesn’t know how to determine “difficulty of ranking” for a given keyword phrase – should be careful using this technique.

  • Andrew Shotland  May 28, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Well put Peter. That said you might want to boost your iyp profile to compete against terms that you are having a hard time getting your site to rank for. For example your site ranks well for “plumber in Pleasanton” but not “Pleasanton plumbing” so you link to your YLocal profile with the words “Pleasanton plumbing”. If this causes your YLocal profile to outrank you then maybe you change the link to another term that is more of a variation (e.g “Pleasanton 24 hour plumber” or “Pleasanton rooter service”, etc.

  • Josh Garner  May 29, 2008 at 5:04 am

    I like it.

    As for hating it when someone beats me to the punch, I actually like that as well. I love it when I’m thinking about a post, and a “rockstar” happens to post it first. It means I’m on the right track with my mindset. Well, it also means I’m a poor, lazy blogger 🙂

  • Andrew Shotland  May 29, 2008 at 8:35 am

    I do think of McStud as the “Meat Loaf” of local seo bloggers.

  • Steve McStud  May 29, 2008 at 8:52 am

    Really? I tend to think of myself as the Brad Pitt of local seo but, to each their own. LOL.

  • Andrew Shotland  May 29, 2008 at 8:56 am

    On second thought McStud may be more of a Henry Rollins type. I don’t see him doing the rock-opera thing.

  • Steve McStud  May 29, 2008 at 11:07 am

    LOL, I like the Rollins comparison because he has his own talk show. And no matter what you think of him that’s pretty bad a**

  • Ramona  May 31, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    I’m trying to make local niche markets a speciality..So far so goodtthanks

  • David  October 10, 2009 at 10:47 am

    Hi,

    Can you give me an example, of where should I include the anchor text link, and what should be the link url?

    Thank you.