Internet Marketing and SEO Tips

by Dave Maloney
Whether you have a brand new website for your business or it's been around since the dawn of the world wide web, you may have wondered how long it has to take to show up in search engines. Or you may be looking at the local search results that Google serves up at the beginning of a search and wonder why your business isn't there. Just like everything else in Internet Marketing, your work isn't over when the website goes live; you have to apply to be displayed here, but don't worry, at least it's free!

by Dave Maloney
Do you have or have you thought about your website's SEO strategy, or are you just winging it? Inbound Marketing can deliver incredible results, but it takes effort! There never has been and still isn't a nice little piece of code that you can just add to your homepage and “be at the top of Google.” So with all the things on your SEO to-do list, here are a few “to-don'ts:”

by Dave Maloney
A blurb that just reads “Hornbuckle Design Services is awesome! - J.S., Professional” doesn't really say anything about your company. Having a whole testimonials page full of these isn't going to be very helpful to your business either.

by Dave Maloney
When Facebook updated their design to the new Timeline format at the end of March and we showed you how to add a cover photo, we were kidding when we said "Now you can do it all again!" But sadly, we didn't realize how soon it would be before Facebook would be tweaking things some more...just in case you weren't 100% happy with your new cover layout, on April 26th you get another chance to rethink your design!

By Dave Maloney
As if setting aside the time and mental energy to post a blog article on a regular basis wasn't trying enough for business owners and marketers (who already have a full week's worth of work to deal with), finding a few minutes to check in with the social networking piece of your inbound marketing strategy probably falls even further off the back of the back burner. Logging in to each of your different profiles to post something you think your audience will find interesting can be a little tedious and more often than not we'll make a mental note to come back to it later and never get a round tuit. Well, good news for you Hubspotters: the clever folks at HubSpot recently rolled out a new little feature that makes sharing a lot easier.

by Dave Maloney
Have you ever received an email from an “online reputation management” company who is offering to take care of your company's ratings and reviews across the internet? For a price, they'll go out and search for any feedback on your company or brand, and “clean up” any negative stuff. They may even claim that they work with customer review sites to remove any negative feedback. If you think that this sounds a little too good to be true, well, it is, because they can't.
Customer review site Yelp announced “There's never been any amount of money one can pay -- to Yelp or any third party -- to manipulate reviews.” (Not only is Yelp a great resource for customer reviews of local businesses, any industries, any location, it's also a great place to set up a business profile as part of your link building strategy!)

by Dave Maloney
Just when you thought you had your social media branding under control for the time being, you may not want to close Photoshop quite yet. If you're on Facebook or know anyone that is, then you've heard (good and bad) about its new "Timeline" format. Facebook timeline rolled out for personal profiles earlier this month and now business pages are getting the makeover as of March 30th, 2012. (So hopefully you didn't just spend a whole lot of time and/or money paying a graphic designer to create your profile image, because now it won't fit!)

by Dave Maloney
For you business owners who can't justify the time or interest in coming up with clever quotes to post on Facebook, and/or just don't get what is a "tweet" and why, Pinterest may be more your speed. While on one hand, Pinterest is just another social site where you'll have to go set up another company profile all over again, you may find its image based theme (pictures are 1000 words, without the BS) more intriguing and definitely easier to manage.

by Dave Maloney
You may have recently heard a lot of buzz about Pinterest, a relatively new social network which has been gaining popularity in the last couple of months with the momentum of a young Facebook. As a business owner, you probably have two questions: "What is Pinterest?" and "Can Pinterest be used for my business?"

by Dave Maloney
Recently there's been a lot of press about the big changes in the new Google Privacy Policy, with opposers arguing that their privacy is being invaded. Although Google defends that the new changes are only to make your online experience better and more helpful, the whole "Big Brother is watching" thing was bound to come up.