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.

You’re crazy to ask the question, Why Blog because the statistics are overwhelming.  Blogging, when done as part of an inbound marketing campaign, produces 4 major results for you and your company.

If you are working hard to grow your business using internet marketing, your website conversion, and link building traffic from Google, then listen up.  For a long time people have been looking for quick fixes to get a better ranking in Google through paid link building. People have also been trying to avoid doing the hard work to make interesting content.  Now Google has come up with one more way to enforce their main intent. 

If you are a smaller company doing your first bit of research regarding lead generation techniques to improve your marketing results and increase sales then you’re in the right place.  Let me give you a few basic things to think about as you continue your research.  First, it’s important to know what we mean by lead generation techniques.

Do you ever wonder if email marketing is still effective or is it dead?  The short answer is a resounding NO, it's not dead.  Not by a long shot. In today's, “Ask your email marketing consultant” I’m going to give you some food for thought, with hope that you will not only see the value of email but actually decide to use it more.