I can tell you the that #1 thing you need to do is claim your Local Business listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Once you’ve claimed your local listings on the major search engines, do the same on internet yellow page sites like yellowpages.com, superpages.com and dex.com.

Then move on to local directories like local.com, yelp.com, insiderpages.com and merchantcircle.com

Be sure to keep the information identical for each site. This is one case where duplicate content is a positive thing.

For example:
If your trying to rank for “marketing” (which is next to impossible since it’s so vague) it’s going to be very hard.

But if your try to rank for “San Diego Marketing”, you have a much better chance.

You will also see results a lot faster.

I also wrote a post on Starting with Local SEO which mentions how to get faster results.

PS. i think you have a typo in your list at the top of the article…HTLM coding?

In many cases it is not difficult to get to the top or near the top of local searches both organically and with Google’s own local search facility. The more appearances on page one the better from my point of view.

To pick up Randy’s question, keyword research shows that there is a long tail and you can pick up extra hits but you’d only chase those when you’ve got the main keywords covered.

Someone searching for “marketing consultant Forth Worth” is either looking for a marketing consultant in the area or is a marketing consultant checking their own Google ranking and wanting to take a look at the competition.

I can’t see that more generic searches would be localised so someone may ask the question “how can I get better traffic to my website” but they are unlikely to add in Forth Worth as it unnecessarily restricts them from getting the best free advice on the web.

What may happen is that instead of searching for an SEO expert or internet marketing consultant, someone may type in “who can help me get more website traffic in Fort Worth” but Google’s likely to find good combinations for that search based on website content about generating traffic and mentions of Fort Worth.

The great thing is that for the last two weeks much of the uncertainty has gone. Google are now revealing search data in the Adword Keyword tool rather than those silly green bars that used to appear.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Now we can see that “marketing consultant fort worth” doesn’t generate many hits at all, “marketing fort worth” only generates a few.

Sometimes people know the solution so they google it (KC remodeler), but sometimes people just search on questions / problems they are having (”how do I encourage my customers to refer me more often?” or “who is the best web designer in Fort Worth?”)

I’m no SEO expert, so I’m sure just hitting on certain keywords is better (and more likely to hit), but sometimes if I’m typing a QUESTION about my PROBLEM, I may not hit on the keyword (if your keyword is in the SOLUTION, not my PROBLEM).

I would love anyone’s thoughts on this one.