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Today I met with a firm called Localeze that provides local directory submissions.  I understand the importance of this service if your site is competing locally, however I'm not sure the effects of local SEO for a national brand.

Our firm gets most of our traffic from across the country, not just one location, and our business is scattered (which is a good thing).  We rank for service related keywords that are not tied to a location.

We do not show up for local results so our business in our immediate location is weak.  We would like to increase our local presence in search engines but I want to make sure that this will not take away from our national presence.

Will optimizing a site for local search negatively affect general rankings?

Thanks

The general rule used to be around 300 words of copy on the homepage, but so many new websites now have very little copy, if any, on the homepage.

Has the best practice changed here? If you include keywords in the title and header tags, is that enough to support strong SEO on the homepage...or do you need a few hundred words of copy still? Would love to hear what others think.