I’m going to assume that you have optimized your site/content to reflect your target locale; cityname + target terms in <title> elements, cityname + target terms + variants in meta description, etc.  So the main focus of this article will be on link acquisition; how to acquire high-quality, one-way inbound links for your local business website.

As with any businesses endeavor, competitive intelligence ought to be your starting point.  Without knowing what you are up against, you have no basis on which to develop a meaningful link development strategy.  It’s no secret that link development is the cornerstone of SEO, so your goal at this point is to deconstruct the link profiles of your competitors.

To get started, you’ll need a list of local terms you want to rank for.  After you have compiled your list, go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and perform searches for each of them.  Grab the url’s for the first 30 sites ranking at each of the search engines for your target terms.  Then you’ll want to run those url’s through Yahoo Site Explorer to determine which sites are linking to your competitors.  Now go out and find a way to get links from those same sites!

Admittedly, this is an extremely simplified process.  There’s a lot of other things to consider when building quality links, but this should help the beginners out there get started.  I’ll be sure to do a follow-up post sometime in the near future with some more advanced tactics.  So until then…

Before I lead in with some examples, I want to state that it is my firm belief that the businesses involved have no idea about any of this. So if you are a local business and your website has recently disappeared from Google, let this be a lesson to you; do not contract out your SEO work to an unscrupulous design firm with little-to-no knowledge of search engine marketing. It will do more harm than good!

I’ll start with an example from the local real estate industry. While Guelph, Ontario is a relatively small market in the grand scheme of things, the following serves as an example of the way certain companies play off of the ignorance of their clients. Check out the search results for the query “guelph real estate agent”, and pay particular attention to results #1, #2, and #9. Let’s do another search for “guelph mortgages”, and again take note of the search results for position #1 and #2. At first glance, nothing seems out of place, right? Let’s dig a little deeper, and see what we find.

A site: query on the site ranking #1 for “guelph real estate agent” turns up something rather interesting. You’ll have to drill down to page 3 to find it, but the following page pops up: www.otimultimedia.com/seo.html . So we have a completely useless page with no meaningful content to speak of, but a lot of spammy links with juicy anchor text. Clicking on the last link in the list takes us to this page: http://www.otimultimedia.com/seolinks.htm, which again is nothing more than a collection of spammy links. As if that wasn’t bad enough, these same spammy link pages are hosted on dozens of their client sites: http://guelphrealestatecentre.com/seolinks.htm, http://www.guelph-real-estate-services.com/seolinks.htm, http://www.debolender.com/seolinks.htm, http://www.gillmullis.com/seolinks.htm, http://www.teamreidy.com/seolinks.htm, http://www.bildwellfinancial.com/seolinks.htm, etc.

So why is this bad, you might ask? Well, the truth is that this type of activity is wrong on a number of levels. First off, these practices are in direct violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. In very plain English, Google advises publishers not to engage in “tricks intended to improve search engine rankings” or to get involved with “link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking”. A quick glance at any of the pages noted above shows that these sites are all involved in “link schemes” designed to increase their search engine rankings. But that’s not what bothers me…

What bothers me is that this company would take such a foolish gamble with the livelihood of their clients. These are real people with real businesses trying to make an honest living, and I can’t imagine why anybody would decide to put them in the line of fire by engaging in such an obvious attempt to game the search engines. Even worse, is that the company in question is probably charging their clients an exorbitant fee for these so-called “SEO services”. So if any of the businesses noted above happen to be reading this, I would advise you to stop doing business with these clowns immediately. They are sabotaging your business, and you are paying them to do it! Dump them now, and then contact me. Ciao for now, folks.