In my last post I talked about how a Panda just ate your website. In this post I'm going to talk about how Panda not only ate your website but he ripped it up into little pieces and laughed as he did it!

Before 2008, Google was robots and computers. Like good little robots they looked for keywords, meta-information, tags, etc. However, the little robots were just smart enough to see they they we getting fooled by slightly smarter humans like webmasters and bloggers.

Eventually, Google got rid of the robots and started hiring humans, thousands of them, to look at websites. They looked for things like fresh content, easy layout and nice design. Over the past few years, the humans told the robots what they found and the robots got smarter.

In April of this year, Google released the first of its “Panda” updates. We heard a little bit about these, but it didn’t make huge waves on the web. Then, however, in November, they released the biggest update yet. This new update impacted more than one-third of all searches and websites.

This is big news for Internet marketing. Your website and everything you do online must change. The two most important things – the things that matter most - are:

1. ORIGINAL content
2. Overall layout/design/user experience

So what doesn't matter any more?

• keywords
• title tags
• tags
• meta-information
• backlinks

These things are still useful, but the robots know that they can be fooled so they don't pay much attentions to them any more.

Do you want to keep the Panda from laughing when he eats your website? Figure out how you can answer yes to these seven questions.

1. Is your content created and managed by an expert or or by someone who is unclear about what you do?
2. Are you avoiding getting your product data from someone else who is mass producing and distributing it?
3. Is your content well written or is it full of choppy sentences and grammatical errors?
4. Are your descriptions fun to read and do they describe how you can use the product or are they short and full of jargon?
5. Is it easy to find your way around your website or are there thousands of links that go to pages that no one visits?
6. Is your design modern or is 2006 the last time you touched your site?
7. Are your customers sharing links from your website on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook?

The more questions you can answer 'yes' to the better... good luck with Panda!

David Verchere / PostHelpers