I own investment property in Murrells Inlet, SC. This fall, I decided to list the property for sale. During our vacation, we shot video of the home and the community. So my son edited the raw video and placed in our You Tube. I gave him a description and set of keywords targeting people looking for local town homes.

The tags for my video were :

“murrells inlet myrtle beach townhome condo for sale south carolina home garden city golf waceamaw hospital”

This evening I did a You Tube search for “murrells inlet townhouse” and was pleased to see our video was #1 on the results page. The second video is another townhouse for sale in the same community. Investigating why our video showed before our neighbor’s, I discovered some sharp contrast in their video tags

The tags for my neighbor’s video were:

“murrells inlet homes for wynbrooke townhouse murrells inlet condo screalestatepartners jake lee real estate jake lee ann mckinnon”

In comparing several variations of local search results, I believe there were strengths and weaknesses to both approaches:

1) Our home showed up #1 for “murrells inlet townhouse”, “murrells inlet townhouses”, “murrells inlet townhomes”, and “murrells inlet townhome”. I believe my neighbor’s usage of “murrells inlet homes for” as a single entry in their video tag was a mistake and they should have gone with a targeted geo tag, either “murrells inlet” or “myrtle beach”.

2) My neighbor’s property showed up first for “wynbrooke townhome” – in fact, my home didn’t display because I made the mistake of leaving our community name – Wynbrooke – off out tag list. This was a mistake and I’m going to fix it.

3) My home shows up at the bottom of the results for the more competitive search terms “myrtle beach townhome” and “myrtle beach townhomes”. My neighbor didn’t target the metro area “myrtle beach” in their title or tags. I believe this was a mistake and limited their video’s reach.

Here is what I learned from this exercise:

1) When you geo tag a local video on You Tube, target the metro area, county, city/town, and community. This gives you broad reach to target internet users searching for videos about a specific area.

2) Use a geo name in your video’s title to help support your tag list. Also seed your video description with a few geo names you were not able to target in your video title.

3) Use more shorter tags vs. fewer longer tags. Try to use the city name as a standalone tag instead of combining it with the state name or the product or service represented in the video. These keywords are important and the state name, product, or service deserve to be a standalone tag.

I believe these suggestions will help your videos appear at the top of You Tube’s local search results.

In May, I began working with a Wedding Officiant in Buffalo, NY. Like most professionals, Sandra Hustead was using a non geo domain name for her primary business address. Sandra was kind enough to provide some articles for Local Expert’s wedding planning blog, so I decided to provide free SEO advice.

After a quick search on Google, I noticed that Sandra’s site was buried on page four in the search results for several key local search terms, commonly used by brides to find a wedding officiant. Cross referencing with GoDaddy, I found that both BuffaloOfficiant.com and BuffaloOfficiants.com were unregistered and available for Sandra to use as her primary online address. I sent Sandra this message:

“Sandra, I would register BuffaloOfficiant.com and BuffaloOfficiants.com and then build your site on this domain. My experience is if you provide quality content and link to this domain you should be able to secure the #1 position on Yahoo and Google whenever any bride searches for “Buffalo Officiant(s)”.

Sandra registered BuffaloOfficiants.com in May 2009. Tonight I did the same search on Google and was happy to see that Sandra’s site was #4 for the local search term “Buffalo Officiants”. While satisfied with the results, a quick scan of her Metatags indicated areas for quick improvement.

The current Metatags on BuffaloOfficiants.com:

<title>Welcome</title><meta name=“Keywords” content=“buffaloofficiants, officiants, weddings, marriage, services, non-denominational, minister, officiant, local officiants, ceremonies,civil,service” /><meta name=“Description” content=“I am available to perform your wedding ceremony in WNY. I absolutely love what I do!” />

This evening, I suggested changing the Metatag for BuffaloOfficiants.com to:

<title>Buffalo Officiant Sandra Hustead specializes in non-denominational wedding ceremonies</title><meta name=”Keywords” content=”buffalo officiants, officiants, weddings, marriage, services, non-denominational, minister, officiant, local officiants, ceremonies, civil, service” /><meta name=”Description” content=”Buffalo wedding officiant available to perform your wedding ceremony. I absolutely love what I do!” />

We can track Sandra’s progress and see if her site rises in the search results for the local search terms “buffalo officiants”, “buffalo officiants”, “buffalo wedding officiant”, and “buffalo wedding officiant”.

By changing to a geo domain, Sandra was able to rise from the back pages to the first page. Now, changing the meta-tags to provide better targeting, should help her achieve top billing in her local market.