Local Search Engine Optimization is a burgeoning new subcategory of website development and marketing.  All of the major search engines put a lot of emphasis on local content.  One way to draw more visitors to your website is to create landing pages targeting specific cities and neighborhoods.  If you are thinking about a local online marketing campaign, make sure you don't put a lot of money into be #1 on Google schemes or filling your website with useless content.  Here are some tips:

In our previous post we looked at a couple of ways to get your website banned from Google.  Today we are going to look at more tactics that will get you banned from Google's search.

Google’s algorithms may be hard to understand, but the Webmaster Guidelines that it provides developers are pretty clear on what you can and cannot do when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.  To help you understand what NOT to do to try to get your site ranked higher we have covered some past and present examples of how to get your website banned by Google overnight. 

Here are some additional guidelines for having a successful website since the Panda update.

New Content
Panda does not require that all Web professionals suddenly become Pulitzer level authors, but a re-evaluation of your current content strategy is still a good idea. Even if it requires a temporary or outsourced hire, ensuring that all existing content meets the above criteria before embarking on any new link building efforts is critical.

The next step is to consider how your business can provide a high quality of useful content going forward, and that may require trying some new channels you have previously avoided until now. If your company is already producing regular blog posts and whitepapers that will draw in links from quality sites, perhaps now is the time to consider video, webinars and/or podcasts, and distribute them through YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Slideshare, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Be social, but smart
The first, and most important part of building links in the Panda era is about producing useful content to which quality sites throughout your niche will want to link. The second and next most important part is about forging and building those relationships that will be the most valuable to your business.

Like the mention of video in the paragraph above, if you have not been taking proper advantage of social media until now, it is definitely time to start. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are three excellent places to start for finding and exchanging links with reputable websites in your specific niche or business category, but they are only the beginning. Building links in the Panda era requires a lot more work than previously, and hours of research and dozens of emails and phone calls may be required to build and maintain the necessary relationships with other website owners.

But be careful about the relationships you pursue, because the Panda algorithm will judge your business by the quality of the links you are able to build. That much has not changed; what has changed is the premium value put on today’s content, and the amount of work that will be required to create and distribute that content in order to build the quality links that will net the best search results.

If you happened not to know what the Google Panda updated search algorithm is, you really should.  Google's Panda Update is a filter originally introduced in February 2011 meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google's top search.

Most online businesses are having to make adjustments to achieve the desired search rankings under the new algorithm, and your approach to building links has to change as well. No longer do the old rules of link building apply, where you could purchase links to your site.  Those will only hurt your ranking.  A well defined link-bulding plan is your best option now.

Here are some guidelines to build links post Panda: 

Check Your Site First
The goal of the Panda update is to improve the quality of content on the Web, thus improving the quality of Google’s search results. Sites that engage in content farming or otherwise low-quality content creation have been the primary targets, and the updated algorithm was designed to punish those sites by significantly lowering their search rankings.  Have lots of pages with duplicate content is one of the worst things you can do (Ex. having pages for each state saying you do business in that state but that has mostly the same content except for the different state names and a few other words).

The way that this effects link building going forward is that businesses must be very careful about whom they share and receive links.  Linking to and from sites that Google has deemed as having a low quality content is a virtual death sentence. Before starting any new link building initiatives, businesses and website owners must ensure that their sites do not fall into this category.

A professional design is imperative, as are acceptable page load speeds and signals of trust that provide clear indications to users and other businesses that your business website is a reputable destination. Most important, of course, and the whole reason behind Panda, is the ability to produce quality content that is useful, accurate, authoritative, current and free of grammatical and spelling errors.

In our next article, we will look at more guidlines for Panda.