Ranking my site for a local keyword
 

Hi all,
First of all, this is my first post here. I am looking for a good SEO forum and this seems to be worth a try.

I have a mission to accomplish. What i would like to do is rank one of my sites for a keyword, "(mytown) restaurants". MYTOWN has a small population of 20,000 people but it is still desirable to be first in google for this keyword of-course. I was thinking because there would be such low competition that it would be a decently easy keyword to rank but I am trying to figure out a method to use for this.

In this case, my website is not a business and therefore does not belong to Google places, but for this keyword GP results are displayed. I would need to outrank these and I was wondering if this is a difficult task to accomplish with a non GP page. Using Market Samurai I know the top place page I am ranking against is listed in the Yahoo directory, the DMZ directory and is optimized towards the keyword other than in the URL. They have 400,000 backlinks to their domain but only 30 Backlinks to their page. They are not a GP page either.

So I was wondering if I optimized my site towards this keyword, what would be the best way to start building backlinks to this page to outrank my competition. I was advised not to buy a link building package from twitter as they can be portrayed of as spammy links, but I did run over a service the other day called backlinks genie and was wondering if these would have the same effect. Since it is more of a local result I am sensing that it is quite a bit different from ranking your ordinary page for something like a Micro Niche. I would prefer to outsource the link building for a cheap price.

Thank you for sharing the useful information.

Long posts, backlinks etc will do it

Nice article and tips... Thanks for share with us...

I advise everyone to focus locally first, its easy to rank at the top very fast locally. So you shouldn't have a issue in that department with 20,000 people. What baffles me is that you Say you want to Ranks for "YOURTOWN Restaurant." like "Athens GA restaurant" and then you later say it isn't a business that is in Google local. If it is a restaurant, you can list it in Google local. You can list any business in Google local, the trick is to disable the "find my location" area when you are creating the directory listing. That way the address isn't listed, yet the name of the business pops up in the local directory i.e. Google local Restaurants in Athens GA. So, yes, you can list any business, and just set the address as private.
I personally wouldn't pay anyone online for backlinks. Or use any auto-generating program. The web is full of nightmare stories about being sandboxed by google for using a program or some shady company and they got spam backlinks that caused google to delist their website.
The easiest way to beat local competition is to use AHREFS.com to run a querry on your competitions websites. Monitorbacklinks.com also will keep tabs on your competitors backlinks. I use these to see where my competitors that are ranking well are setting up their links.
If you have a marketing budget, set up a small Adwords campaign for specific Keywords only!! and pay for the "MYTOWN restaurant" searches. If you are in America, I would add the area code too. Like "restaurants in 727".... Set Negative keywords too. That way people are clicking the keywords you want associated with the search words YOU picked.
Use Google keyword planner in Adwords with your Google acct. I use the keyword planner to see how many words are typed and what searches are run. From that point I design keywords I put on the internet myself. :D

The total number of backlinks is not the key factor. You need to increase the number of unique domains

Your site does have a somewhat simple and dated look, while not a huge factor to the search engines, I might try something else for a background in place of that stunning yellow. The Facebook badge is obscuring some info.

Great post thanks for sharing.