We all know the value of word-of-mouth recommendations in promoting our business, whether you are in the hospitality industry, work as a car mechanic, own a restaurant, or have a company looking to attract superior talent to join their ranks. Enter online reviews.

Online reviews can come from a host of sources – if you have a business and you aren’t checking for these reviews onine periodically, you should be!  The stats for online reviews are impressive: 86% of consumers read them before making purchasing decisions, making reputation management a must for businesses of all sizes. With the introduction of travel review sites such as TripAdvisor, regional dining reviews , potential customers and clients are savvy. Why risk going out for an expensive dinner, stay at a hotel or resort, or do some retail shopping without first seeing what others have to say? Not surprisingly, online reviews have become an integral part of any successful SEO and SMO campaign.  (more…)

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…)

Recently I was surfing some SEO blogs when I came across a post on a search marketing conference. I like to see what the other leaders in online marketing are saying these days, so I was anxious to read the entire post, and was well on my way until I came across #13 in their list of top 20 quotes from the conference. It reads:

13. Don’t worry too much about duplicate content.
(Luisella Mazza, Google) (more…)

In a world full of new technologies and online platforms appearing at every turn, it can often be difficult to distinguish the worthwhile from the total-waste-of-time efforts when it comes to self promotion on the Web. We’re here to fill you in on LinkedIn.com, one of the biggest social media giants impacting the online business community as we know it today. You may be wondering what exactly LinkedIn is, how it works, why it’s important and/or how to use it effectively. If so, please read on. (more…)

We just learned that Facebook is going to be launching a new system within the week that will let you reserve a Facebook username for your account. So now instead of being identified as user 123456789 you can be identified as “your.name” or “YourName” – or even “coolguy123″!

Here is the illustration they gave:
Old URL

New URL

No doubt, this will also help your public profile get found in the search engines because, as you know, SEO is all about targeting keywords!

But Wait… That’s Not All!

You can also reserve custom usernames for your Facebook PAGES. This is particularly useful for businesses on Facebook. (more…)