Whatever your business: real estate, dining, travel or retail, the economy is certainly making itself known to you in one form or another. Managing your internet marketing budget during this time is a challenge, no doubt about it – you definitely want to get the most from your online advertising dollar. So…how do you decide what to focus on and what gets put on hold?

 Search engine optimization is often considered a soft marketing tool that can be paused, delayed or done away with entirely, then pulled back out as a stop-gap measure when the going gets rough.  Not so! Although SEO does lend itself to both short and long-term goals, when it comes to budgeting your marketing dollars, you’ll want to give careful consideration to where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.
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Are you running out of optimization ideas for your website? Looking for a little bit of inspiration to get you back on track? (we know you’re not, but just in case there’s a brain freeze today we thought we’d ask)

Then we’d like to recommend that you take a look at the PDFs on your site to make sure that they are optimized. One of the items we find when looking at websites is that the PDFs have been completely ignored. Now to be fair, some of this is probably because up until a few years ago many people were told that PDFs couldn’t or shouldn’t be optimized; that any work done to them would not help the page’s or the website’s ranking. Let’s put this argument to bed right now: (more…)

So….you’ve worked hard to garner a bevy of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. You are blogging, Tweeting, Digging, gaining friends and fans and linking everywhere. These online social media environments can create a vibrant, relevant, active platform that will benefit your business in any number of ways. As your network grows, however, you may find that the maintenance of these has become incredibly time consuming and complex to the point that you are experiencing some anxiety. You may be suffering from social media fatigue! (more…)

As announced by Google, they have rolled out two new result page improvements. The one we will focus on today is their LONGER SNIPPETS improvement.

Typically, when you search in Google, your results page will return a Title with about a line and a half description from which you will make the decision if this is a click worthy site or not.  The words utilized in your search query are bolded to accentuate the relevancy of the results to you and in most cases have been pulled from your meta description.

Google felt like queries with more than three words deserved more of a snippet explanation. A longer description in these cases will allow enough information for you to determine whether or not this is the site you want to explore. The increase in the number of lines in the snippet allows for more text and shows more of the words you queried in the context of the page.

Try it out! Make sure to use a long, detailed query.

What does this mean for you and your SEO campaign? (more…)

Thinking outside the box is standard procedure in the world of internet marketing! A sophisticated and intelligent world-wide market has succeeded in demanding (and receiving) better quality websites, professional writing and copy, lightning-fast speed, slick audio and interactive environments.  So…what if you’re a ‘Mom and Pop’? Maybe you have a small brick-and-mortar shop, have a specialty item you want to sell, or just want to stick your toe in the water and see if you have what it takes to run with the big dogs? Is there room for you, or has it all just gotten too big? (more…)