Are you fed up with feeling baffled by search engine optimization (SEO) because of jargon and poor practitioners? Do you feel you have been charged too much for less than you were promised? This two part article sets out to explain the process and put you back in control.

If you have focused objectives and a clear online strategy then SEO will almost always be a good cost effective addition to the marketing tool set. The first thing to understand is that search engine businesses, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, have customers to satisfy too. Their customers are searching and they expect to see the ‘best and most relevant’ search results. I expect like me, you get frustrated if your searches bring irrelevant results first. No surprise then, that the methods used by the search engine operators are designed to deliver customer satisfaction. They work hard to eliminate bogus SEO services that aim to cheat. (more…)

Personalization Sometimes Trumps Relevance on SERPs

Not everybody is a fan of the increasingly personalized search results they get from Google. Some criticize them as a way for Google to give advertisers reasons to rely on PPC as opposed to the less predictable organic results, and others just find it disruptive to relevance. (more…)

The SEO industry has been plagued for years by a lack of consistency with SEO terms and definitions. One of the most prevalent inaccurate terms we hear is “duplicate content penalty.” While duplicate content is not something you should strive for on your website, there’s no search engine penalty for having it.

Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the web. It’s nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some dupe content for whatever reason, you don’t have to lose sleep every night worrying about the wrath of the Google gods. They’re not going to shoot lightning bolts at your site from the sky, nor are they going to banish your entire website from ever showing up for relevant searches. (more…)

We’ve previously discussed the web’s tendency to take very good ideas and adapt them to techniques largely unrelated to their original intent. Nowhere is this more currently prevalent than in the realm of social media networking.

SM sites were intended to allow people to present a profile and keep in touch with interested parties. In essence a combination of email and webpage, they exploded in popularity with the sort of overnight success common to the web. Of course users drive popularity, and where there are users, there is a captive audience – and businesses are always keen to adopt a potential audience. (more…)

Bing Shows How to Inspire Consumer Engagement with a Brand

There are many ways to market your business through Facebook. Some are obvious, and others not so much. One thing you can pretty much count on is that there are incredible masses of people on the social network that you can potentially reach, and in ways that will allow them not only to engage with your brand in a comfortable setting, but with other Facebook ecosystems they are already engaging with. (more…)

Optimizing images is very important when optimizing any website or blog. If images are optimized correctly, they can bring a huge amount of traffic to your site. Image optimization is highly advantageous but the most underused when it comes to optimizing websites to increase rankings and traffic.

Depending on niche and images used, one may be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. Following are a few points you can put into practice when optimizing your website: (more…)

With so much misinformation out there, along with a lack of knowledge about how SEO works, you could end up getting your website banned from the search engines. Learn how to avoid common mistakes with these 10 simple do’s and don’ts. (more…)

There are many different methods of marketing your business website, on-line shop or e-commerce website, but for many business owners there seems to be a bit of confusion between what is considered generic back link building and what is a true social marketing campaign, and more to the point what is the aim of each marketing strategy?

Different SEO and web marketing companies will of course employ different methodologies to promote a site and more often than not you get what you pay for so to speak. Equally there is bound to be a crossover in campaign strategies the debate of which could go on for months, but the purpose of this article is to highlight the key differences and aims of each type of campaign not what any single campaign should contain. (more…)

Web video is a communication technique that provides a viewer-experience that delivers several big advantages over broadcast: first, the length of your presentation is for the most part a non issue other than the degree to which your content and delivery holds your audience’s attention; second, the cost to produce and present professional online video is far more affordable than broadcast; and third, Web video provides the chance to intellectually and emotionally engage your audience with a memorable viewing experience, and involve them physically by prompting direct-response action. On the other hand, broadcast does provide a mass audience, but not necessarily an attentive one like your website. (more…)