Have you ever heard of the term Best Practices?  If you’ve ever read a business book or an improvement book then you probably have. It seems like the term comes up all the time. One book says “best practices are amazing” and the other says “best practices are horrible,” but they never seem to define them. And it always seems to refer to big companies on the stock exchange and rarely about small business leaders like you and me.

Today I made a new friend on my flight from Frankfurt to Rome but when I climbed into my seat next to the window I had no idea that a treat was waiting for me as I sat next to this elderly couple, who were also on Holiday. I thought I would disappear into my computer and headphones but instead I was reminded how important it is to be able to contribute in this world through your work and how important it is to share those stories; even when you’ve been retired for 17 years.

Happy Monday to everyone.  I wanted to pass along this blog from Search Engine Land that talks about all the changes in SEO especially around link building.  I want you to understand and be kept up to date with all the changes.  If you have been talking with me at all in the last 6 months you have probably heard me talk about link building and how it has changed.  Many of the people who come to us looking for help have heard or even invested a lot of time and money in link building strategies because they helped people rank better in Google.  

I'm always looking for something to help me grow; to be a more effective marketer and just plain better human being. I also like it when whatever I find to learn about is interesting too. I also believe that when I'm growing I'm creating a fuller, more enjoyable life. That's why I like www.ted.com so much. 

Every small business wants its website to be on the front page of Google.  Don’t you? 

The challenge is that the world of SEO (search engine optimization) has been changing a lot over the last two years and most of those changes are not even known by the general population. This means that as a business owner you need to beware of SEO services for small business and big business alike.  What you don’t know can really hurt you.

If you want to rank well in Google, and by that I mean you show up near the front page of Google, you need to understand at least 3 things when evaluating a company you want to work with for SEO services.

There is no one right strategy for marketing online.  Common sense will tell you that, even if you don’t know anything about the internet. But - and here it is - there are only a few small differences between most of the successful internet marketing strategies.  If you want to take advantage of the power and the cost effectiveness of internet marketing then you need a great strategy, and unless you’re one of the experts arguing over the little things then I will say this to you:

If you're reading this then you are probably wondering what did Google do again. 

Well it took away a major piece of reporting from all of us in regards to how you evaluate your company's effectiveness in the Google Search. You and I can no longer see what keywords people are coming to our site from. Whether you are a small business or large one or somewhere in between this impacts you. If you are monitoring these things on your company website then you rely on this data to make informed decisions and adjust your SEO strategy.  If you aren't monitoring these things then you need to. Google is the most important source of traffic in any succesful online strategy for any size business. 

Google has once again changed the way it does something and this time it is all about keyword research, which will affect you when deciding how to add keywords to a website.  It has changed the way you and I can search for keywords by taking away the old interface on the Google Keyword Search tool and replacing it with the Keyword Planner Tool.  Change is always a bit annoying and when software is involved you never know if it is a good change or not.

As I was sitting in church on this Labor Day weekend I found myself wondering what Labor Day is really about. 

I know I've asked the question a million times and I know I’ve looked it up before but for some reason I couldn't find it in my head. So in a moment of distraction with my cell phone in hand I went to trusty Google and asked for a definition of Labor Day and this is what I got.

I'm in Boston and I'm walking in the Hynes convention center to see Seth Godin as the first Keynote speaker of Inbound 13.  This is THE conference for internet marketing and creating marketing that people actually want.

I walk in the center and join all the people half my age moving towards the escalator.  I'm finally here when I get stopped on the second floor and asked for my badge which is still deep in my bag and my hands are full with the walking breakfast.  Got up a bit too late for a sit down breakfast.