Article By Matthew Meyer
Google Place Search (formerly known as Google Places) rules local search. Just try it. Go to Google and type in “Personal Injury Attorney Your City.” The first seven listings in the “natural search listings” are all Google Places pages. Since 20% of searches are local and the majority of their over $30 billion in revenue comes from small businesses, Google has decided to go hard after local small business advertising.
They started by creating 50 million Google Places pages using aggregated data from online directories and the Yellow Pages. These pages are mobile optimized and attached to Google Maps.
Only about 8% of local businesses have actually claimed their Google Place Search page. Even less have fully optimized their pages. However, this is changing fast. Local businesses are getting hip to the importance of Google Places pages. If you have a local business, the first place potential customers will start to find you is on your Google Places page from their smart phone. You want to make sure you are at the top of the list for your category. Here is how you get a jump on your competition in local search:
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Let me start off by explaining exactly what I mean when I say “outsourced content.” Just because a piece of content wasn’t written inside the four walls of your office, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s “outsourced” as I define it. Do I think hiring a freelance writer to manage your business blog counts as outsourcing? No. Do I think having a PR firm write and distribute press releases under your company’s name counts as outsourcing? No. Do I think hiring a social media marketing or SEO firm to write and promote content counts as outsourcing? No.
34% of businesses say
With so much misinformation about SEO having been dispensed over the years, it’s hard to know what’s true and isn’t true – making it all the more difficult to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, as it were. Concerned about the potential harm misinformation about SEO can ultimately cause, I decided to compile an alphabetical listing of the most popular and persistent SEO myths, to either debunk or confirm their factuality.
A study featuring over 2100 adults in the UK has indicated that only eight percent of online adults who have taken a holiday in the past year, have discussed their holidays or read other people’s advice and recommendations on Facebook. This compares to 57 percent of all online adults who use Facebook each week.
It’s been an extremely busy year for the good folks at Google, not only did they roll out the game-changing Panda Updates, but now they have increased the stakes by implementing Google Fresh. This recent algorithm update is based on the Caffeine architecture introduced by Google a year ago and supposedly makes Google’s listings much fresher.
Google looks bad if a search for “New York hotels” returns a bunch of locations that are actually closed. If Google’s results are inaccurate or off, fewer people will use the search engine, meaning Google serves less ads. And Google has made its billions serving ads. So you can see why Google has to vet hotels and other local properties before pushing them to the top of their search-engine results pages.
OK, so you’ve decided that getting some web video on your website and social media profiles is a great idea to make you more appealing to prospects and put your SEO (search engine optimization) on HGH. You realize that video marketing is a key part of your overall search engine marketing and social media strategy. Bully for you! Now onto the tech stuff. Video formats can be mind-boggling and vary depending on the equipment the video was shot with, the type of computer you use, and the final destination where you want to host and serve up your on-demand video as part of your video marketing plan.
Trying to unlock
Did you know landing pages are one of the most important elements of a website? In fact, 94% of companies say
Learn the key traits of a great business website. Become a website optimization rock star with 
Being a part of a marketing department in today’s world is somewhat exhausting. All day I am stumbling, digging, tweeting, liking, and connecting. For some, this may sound like a foreign language, but for an employee in the marketing field this sounds like work, work and more work. Social media is a great and cost effective way to start growing your company brand, so I love the idea; however, there comes a point when enough is enough. I have always felt that pretty soon consumers are going to fall behind, and it will then become harder and harder to introduce any new social networking site. In other words, if another networking platform is going to try and weasel its way into the hearts of bloggers and marketers, it would have to be pretty amazing.
1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook, turning the social network into a huge opportunity for marketers. With little effort, you can boost your Facebook interactions by 30 percent or more.
The two most important elements that qualify companies to promote themselves as SEO experts are competence and professionalism. And the way you find out if a company is competent and professional, as well as legitimate, is to do your due diligence and check their credentials thoroughly, by exercising good old common sense and following these steps:
Don’t let the $2 offers fool you – buying SEO content is a big deal, and it’s not something you can cut corners with. After all, on the world wide web, your content is the only way that people can find out more about you. Whether you want to build up your reputation, get people to sign up for your email list, or sell your product, you’re going to need SEO content to do it.
Is your website bringing in at least five new inquiries per day? If not, you need to look at its functionality.
With more than 800 million users, Facebook has become a powerful marketing tool. In fact, 45% of B2B and 67% of B2C companies have acquired customers via Facebook.
Published October 10, 2011
LinkedIn provides an easy way to create a 

The first step in getting a product or service reviewed is to realise that people don’t actually want to review it.
Traffic is essential to anyone who owns a website and/or blog. Without traffic we have no customers or sales. Unfortunately traffic does not just come to us, we have to work at it and we have to be consistent and persistent.

With the advent of the Internet and the worldwide dominance and prominence of Google, Facebook and Twitter, one could reasonably assume the whole world revolves around the Internet. It doesn’t. There’s a great big offline universe out there with nearly 6 billion people in it that was here long before the Internet. And if you don’t have an offline marketing strategy to reach those billions of people, and complement your online marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a significant amount of traffic and income.
Whether you’re just getting started with internet marketing or you just want to brush up on the basics,
If there’s one thing nobody seems to want to talk about, it’s pricing. Most designers don’t publish their rates, and good luck getting a company to tell you how much they paid for their site.
By now, most site owners realize the importance and value of SEO in the development and growth of their site. A properly optimized site is going to rank better in the search engines, see more targéted traffic being directed over, have a higher conversion rate and much more. However, SEO is incredibly long term and nothing can rush time. It takes time for a site to build a good trust factor with the search engines and until that happens, most of your off-site SEO efforts are going to produce minimal results.
92% of online users look for information on search engines. Is your website optimized according to the newest SEO best practices?
In this day and age, technology is constantly evolving. Everyday we are inundated with new features, new interfaces and improved designs that can sometimes make our head spin. Facebook is not exempt from this either and has undergone a lot of major transformations over the past several years. Just recently, Facebook has made some major modifications to its features, and whether you’re a fan or not, they are here to stay.
Learn how to get started with paid search. While paid search can sometimes be complicated,
Finding effective and sustainable methods of building links to your website can prove challenging. However, with some effort or investment on your part, it is possible to enjoy an boost in direct traffic as well as a boost to your link profile and search engine rankings through an ongoing link building strategy. There are tried and tested techniques that have been used for years that help build links in volume, as well as techniques that aim to build a smaller number of links but of much higher value – the perfect combination for a natural looking and effective search engine link profile.
When you work with brands using channels like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, you become very familiar with some of the pitfalls companies can fall into – and what results they seem to generate.

People long have loved to find new and innovative uses for the most innocuous technologies and advances. In the late 19th century, “moving pictures” were a nickel-arcade novelty. Today films such as Avatar are made on budgets comparable to military-grade hardware investments. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone could barely call from one room to another; now the average iPhone has more uses and computing power than all the computers used in World War II combined.
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