In this paper, we propose the construction of quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes based on the modified progressive edge-growth (PEG) algorithm to achieve the maximum local girth. Although the previously designed QC-LDPC codes based on the PEG algorithm has more flexible code rates than the conventional QC-LDPC code, in the design process, multiple choices of the edges may be chosen. In the proposed algorithm, we aim to maximize the girth property by choosing the suitable edges and thus improve the error correcting performance. Simulation results show that the QC-LDPC codes constructed from the proposed method give higher proportion of high local girths than other methods, particularly, at high code rates. In addition, the proposed codes offer superior bit error rate and block error rate performances to the previous PEG-QC codes over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.