Internet Marketing and SEO Tips

by Dave Maloney
Your web page title is one of the most crucial pieces of your SEO puzzle: It is the first thing that is displayed in search results telling the world (human searchers and search engines) what your page is about, and serves as the "Inbound Link" to your page. With that much accountability falling on your page titles, they should be thought about pretty carefully!

Google's latest change could hurt your page rankings if a lot of your content is below the fold!

by Dave Maloney
On their neverending mission to make our online experience more productive by providing the most helpful search results, Google recently announced an update to their algorithm that targets your page layouts. While Google Preview helps users scan a search result to pinpoint exactly where the relevant text is on that page, what they're looking for may still be difficult to find on a long and cluttered page. This usually ends up with the user abandoning the page and returning to the search results to search some more. Google wants to help ease some of that frustration and improve our experience by lowering the rankings of guilty sites.

by Dave Maloney
Hubspot just announced that they will be updating their security/privacy settings starting on Monday, January 23, 2012, which will require HTTPS for all interaction within HubSpot's software. Don't worry, it's not a bad thing (like the all new and "improved" Keyword Grader), but if you've created and bookmarked a link to your HubSpot login, you may have to update it.

by Dave Maloney
The first thing a lot of us think about in regards to inbound marketing is SEO, and how much traffic your site is getting. But getting them there is only half the fun! Now that you've got visitors to your site, what do you have for them once they're there? They came looking for something that you have (if you've done some SEO successfully), but what do you have to offer them that will make your company stand out from your competitors? If you want to generate leads, you need to present something to your visitors that they might actually want bad enough to sign up for.

by Dave Maloney
Did you make any inbound marketing resolutions to help your business this year? Now that the ball has dropped and New Year's Eve is over, it's time make all those life-changing "gonna-dos" happen...or not. We're back to work and reality, and the feeling that your list seems a little too ambitious starts to kick in: "Tackling our inbound marketing is a huge job; maybe we'll have more time, funds, personnel, etc, next year..." Before you file your resolutions away for another year because they're too grand to handle, are there any parts of them that you could focus on this year?

by Dave Maloney
I think a lot of human beings (like me) are not thrilled that Facebook (as well as Google, Twitter, HubSpot, etc, etc) is adding new and exciting features every other day.  It's hard to keep up with all of these "improvements," and you may be missing out on some useful features. Here are a few facebook tricks that you might find helpful with your business page but may not have known were there!

Does your "Contact Us" from do anything for your marketing, or just collect junk from solicitors?

by Dave Maloney
You've learned that through Inbound Marketing your website can be an awesome tool to attract new prospective buyers to your business and generate new leads. Landing pages are pages on your site that have a form which interested visitors can fill out and submit. When they do, you now have their contact info in your leads database, and you can try to sell them something. Your "Contact Us" page is technically a landing page, but is it bringing you any business? No one is filling out your form and you don't know why.

by Dave Maloney
Up until now, Google's latest attempt at social media, Google + was only open to individuals to be able to share and recommend within their "circles" and businesses weren't allowed. Last week Google announced that your company can now create a Google Plus Business page. The look and feel of Google+'s business pages is (disappointingly) almost identical to Facebook's Business pages, and although some of the features may be a little different, the overall social mechanism is the same as we're all used to. So you're probably thinking you really don't need to have another business page on another network to maintain. Well, it might not be a bad idea: this is Google.

So if "every page is a homepage," then what should you have on your home page?

by Dave Maloney
An awful lot of businesses want to cram everything about their company into their home page layout, from every product or service they offer, every accreditation they've ever received, company history, some testimonials from last century, etc, etc. Unfortunately, with the intentions of making everything easy to find all in one place, the result is their visitors can't find what they're looking for, and may abandon your site altogether.

by Dave Maloney
In case you were feeling you had everything online under control for the moment, the guys at Facebook don't want you to get bored. There are more changes on the way intended to improve the users' experience with FB fan pages, and you may want to take a look at your business page before the end of this month.