Most of us have been there and done that with social networking. To be honest, we’re using it for traffic because that’s how it’s done these days. It isn’t that we don’t care for the social networks for the most part, it’s that sites such as Twitter and others are beginning to wear a bit thin. The trite and trivial are essentially what you’re going to read when it comes to blogging in under 150 characters. We all know the value of social media. The [...]

If you’re a marketer,you tend to be somewhat outgoing. In fact, you may dominate the conversations at time, but more importantly, you may market to the exclusion of conversing and that can be a mistake that will cost you plenty. We all know the mentality. In fact, some of us may even have the mentality. EVERYTHING becomes an opportunity to market. I see it all the time, even sometimes in website customers. It becomes a sore subject that everything becomes a means to increase your [...]

The Penguin update hit a lot of sites. That’s an understatement if ever one was made. It hit sites that were link building in a way that they had learned from someone who didn’t know how to teach it. Personally I had a few sites hit that didn’t use bad link building strategies. Some of those were maybe collateral damage, some were sites that well-meaning friends had sent me links from. At the end of the day, I can remove them and move on. I [...]

I’m beginning to have a lot of questions about companies who are offering business coaching, business packages, kits for the newcomer to the web etc etc.It seems to me, having worked with many of these folks over time, that the only real thing they are doing –or at least in some cases–is enriching the seller of the coaching. A few months back I worked with a client who was enthralled and involved with a top name marketer group. He asked me to help him with [...]

There’s another engine out there, in the endless line of Google wannabe’s, but this one may be a little different. As many SEO providers and site owners or users are aware, Google recently unveiled a new algorithm, designed–so the Google misinformation network tells us– to broaden our horizons and give us a broader array of sites in our search engine returns. I don’t know about you, but I’m all for getting more sites back from which to choose when I search for a given topic, [...]

Penguin, Panda, What, When, and Why Websites Lost Ground. by Robbi Drake Many of the clients and friends of several companies with which I work and consult are understandably concerned with a dramatic loss of traffic and positioning in search. The traffic loss may have taken place on Tuesday Morning or late Monday night. You may notice that your traffic percentages are well down, some as many as 60-75%. Your sales are off, your adsense is decimated, and of course you’re wondering at this point [...]

By Robbi Drake Author rank seems to be a big deal lately and in fact, the doomsayers are reporting that the Author Rank could cause more upheaval around the internet than all of the Panda updates combined. What is the truth about AuthorRank, how important is it, and do you need it? While those in the know say that it could cause a vast internet upheaval and others say that it’s a nonessential part of your blog or website, much like anything else, the truth [...]

By Robbi Drake As someone who does SEO, content creation and website building for a living,  I work a great deal with clients from both large and small businesses.  Those of us who do business in any way normally try to be as diplomatic as possible and to treat our  customers as we might want to be treated. I’ve  personally written volumes on how to care for the customer and how to tend to their needs. Why Would You Fire a Customer? We–my partners and [...]

By Robbi Drake We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Mobile applications are getting bigger and bigger. Black Friday last year saw massive amounts of people shopping online instead of in stores. Cyber Monday was a huge hit as well, with about half of the people who shopped online shopping with mobile devices. Mobile and tablet devices are millions strong. If you want to get noticed, get a mobile application out there with your business name on it. With mobile computing, smart phones [...]

By Robbi Drake What a Day!! January 18th was a day that will be forever embedded in the minds of the people who took part.. The SOPA Strike shut down massive numbers of websites. It was just crazy wasn’t it? It was precedent setting, it was amazing and it rocked the world. Today we did something amazing… and the really important part, we have a chance to win. Wikipedia went down for the day, Google featured censorship ads  for the SOPA protest (We and so [...]

Google Author Profile Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about SOPA and PIPA, although realistically, the news media has fallen down quite well on reporting the controversial legislation and the fallout from it. Even though some of the most high-traffic websites across the board have promised to shut down in protest, and internet founders and giants have come out in protest, the mainstream media coverage has been scant, at best. While industry giants such as Reddit, WordPress.org, and Wikipedia proposed blacking their [...]

We are reading a great deal about Google 2012, the Google algorithm changes that are taking place and the various things that will happen this year. We’re seeing quite a lot about Google not requiring users to visit your sites, Google’s money making tactics and so many other doomsday predictions that it has to make you wonder. Google has always been trying to return the highest quality search results for its users. To that end they have implemented many changes in their search algorithm recently, [...]

Market research, especially local market research is ideal and very important for learning more about what your customers, or prospective customers, think, feel, and believe. Retail trends online in companies such as SEO companies or online article writing can help you to be better able to offer the kind of products that your customers want. It can also help you to learn more about how customers behave. For example, you can learn by viewing data from online market research how the people you want to [...]

SEO lately has me just annoyed. As an SEO worker and someone who does this part time for a living, that’s a big statement for me to make. Can’t we have ethical SEO? Maybe, but the fact is that I’m not seeing a lot of it lately. I know, I live, and I understand the reasons for the practice of search engine optimization. I accept that we must get the traffic in order to get our information out to the general public and that a [...]

Choosing An SEO Team For Your Website We’ve spoken our piece about who is and who isn’t an SEO company or specialist, as well as who may be taking advantage of you, or how you can do your own SEO. The question is, if you can’t, or don’t want to do your own SEO, how can you select a trustworthy person to do it for you? When you are selecting your SEO experts, just like choosing a doctor or a dentist, ask questions and make [...]