Today, most major search engines will find your information quickly without you having to submit your website to their search engine. However, to be found in smaller and more specialized search engines, niches or local businesses should be manually submitted, to ensure accuracy and speed the process of being found by your customers. But let’s take a closer look at what exactly to submit.

To maximize your local search optimization, it is suggested that you have a search-friendly WordPress blog to publish your company information, news and enable two-communication with customers through feedback, comments and other ways.

A local search engine basically means that the search results that are returned are targeted to a particular location. So if you’re looking to buy a computer, you would only want to see search results of computer shops that are in the area in which you live.

There are now more and more specialized search engines which you can use to narrow down your search results such as:

1. Yahoo Local Search Engine (http://local.yahoo.com/)

Yahoo has a powerful search engine which return a list of websites that are located in the area you specify such as the address, city, state or zip.

2.    SearchDirectoryof (http://www.searchdirectoryof.com)
This is fast becoming one of the big players in specialized search engines. You can search for results within your local area and in targeted categories such as Entertainment, Hotels etc…

3.    TrueLocal (http://www.truelocal.com)

4.    Yell (http://www.yell.com/)
Dedicated to finding local businesses in the UK.

5.    Genie Knows (http://www.genieknows.com/)
6.    Info USA - http://www.infousa.com/
7.    Localeze – http://www.localeze.com/
8.    SuperPages - http://www.superpages.com/
9.    OpenList - http://www.openlist.com/

On the whole, local search engines are supported by advertisements from businesses that want to display their own details in a prominent area when the correct keywords and location are being searched by the user.

For example, a Manhattan pizza restaurant may want to place an ad with one of the local search engines if the keywords “pizza” and “Manhattan” are being searched together.

Their listing will then be featured at the top of the search engine results, which means that the bulk of the visitors searching for those terms, will more than likely visit their website first.

You may consider paying to be featured as a paid result in the local search engines. The visitors you get will certainly be very targeted, but you need to justify the cost for this type of promotion with the results you’re getting, and calculate whether it’s worth paying for these advertisements with the amount of return on your investment (ROI)

You can monitor how much you’ve paid each month to the local search engines versus how many clicks, leads and ultimate sales are referred from using this method. It’s a number’s game here, too, calculating your ROI to see what works and what doesn’t.

If you don’t want to pay for the featured listing, then you can improve your ranking in the local search engines by doing search engine optimization such as blogging with relevant keywords and linking the blog posts to your website, placing the keywords in the Title and Description tags and within your content, and placing anchor text links to your website.

To be ranked high in the search engines, you need to have a lot of relevant websites linking to you, plus a lot of relevant content. This is the art of search engine optimization.