Hindsight is 20-20. Knowing what I know now after blogging on this domain for 5 years )to the day, actually!( if I could go back and do it over I would have incorporated this blog as part of my company website and not as its own domain. Here's why: Blogs on separate domains can't piggyback on the trust of your website. When I launched this blog the search engines treated it as a brand new website, meaning it had a trust factor of zero. After five years and a massive,

A few weeks ago I got a voice mail message from a representative at Profile Magazine. He said that Profile Magazine was interested in writing a feature article about Brick Marketing and that the first step was a 10-15 minute preliminary interview to learn a little bit more about me and the company.

Brand new websites that are just beginning their SEO campaigns should undoubtedly begin with onsite SEO, the first step of which is keyword research. The keywords you choose )based on the content of your site( will ultimately help determine what search phrases your site rank for and what kind of searcher will find your site. Because new site's don't have 6 months of analytics to jumpstart their keyword research,

**Full disclosure, this is meant to be a humorous type post and rant for fellow SEO professional, sorry if I have offended anyone! :-( After 13 years in this industry, I have had my share of absolutely horrible SEO leads. I know that dealing with bad leads comes with the territory of being a business .

I came across this great article on Search Engine Land a few weeks ago that explains why search rankings and SEO ranking reports no longer matter"something I have thought for a very long time. It's nice to hear other SEO professionals agree that search rankings are too inconsistent and inconclusive to be used as a SEO success metric. Here are a few reasons why website owners shouldn't be so focused on where they rank: 1. The search engines personalize the search results.

When implementing your social media marketing campaigns, one of the first things you have to do )before you even think about building your profiles( is decide who or what is going to be your social persona. Are you going to build your social brand around an actual person )say the VP of Marketing( or stick with the company's name )@CompanyX(? There is no "right" way to build your social personality,

This is a guest post from Amanda DiSilvestro of ResourceNation.com It is no secret that SEO is crucial to the success of a small business, but what many do not realize is that there are different ways to fulfill this crucial need. Many new business owners work with SEO on their own; meaning they decide which keywords to target, focus on getting back-links and have worry about Google rankings and penalties. However, many more established companies choose to use an SEO agency.

What is your "magic number" of success? How many orders shipped, new clients signed or dollars earned would it take you make you jump for joy in your office? Success, even when applied to our businesses, is a very personal definition. For instance, having a sufficient )and steady( workload to justify hiring a new employee might be how you judge your success. Or maybe you are looking to cross the million dollars in revenue mark.

Blog commenting is in incredibly useful form of link building for multiple reasons. Not only is a great way to get a valuable inbound link, it can also help build your online brand, improve your reputation as an industry expert, is the first step in developing a blogger outreach program and much more. However, just like you need to keep your link building strategy organized,

In light of last's month post outing now infamous )and new Internet meme( Ocean Marketing for plagiarizing from this very blog, I thought it was important to stress the importance of original content, which is imperative for online marketing success. Not only the foundation of good SEO, content also feeds your social media marketing campaign, builds your overall online presence and helps establish consumer trust in your brand.

Social media is not just for B2C companies! In fact, some studies have shown that B2B companies are seeing better results with social media marketing than many B2C brands are. Here are three ways B2B companies can better leverage the power of social media to help their own bottom lines. Use social media in conjunction with offline activities. Social media is already a huge component of B2B tradeshows,

Are you a marketing professional, website developer or designer, or local business owner in the Boston, MA area looking to learn more about SEO? Register today for the Boston SEO class on February 22, 2012 with Nick Stamoulis, President of Boston SEO firm Brick Marketing! This all day SEO workshop will teach you the most effective best practice SEO strategies to help increase your rankings and website visitors through onsite optimization and white hat link building.

Let me start of by saying that I do have a Yellow Pages listing for my SEO company, Brick Marketing. It costs me about $50 a month for the profile on the Yellow Pages website. It's a good way to help with my local link building, get a FEW additional local visitors and YP.com is .

I had a client whose site went offline for a few days through no fault of their own. They called me one afternoon in a panic, wanting to know if our developer had taken down their site for some reason. I assured them that my in-house developer would never pull a site down for any reason"your website is your business and your livelihood! As a business owner,

The days of Mad Men marketing are long over. Whether you are ready to admit it or not, very few consumers want to listen to your marketing messages when you are ready to sell. These days, active consumers have taken the buying process into their hands, using search engines, peer review sites, blogs and social networking sites to create their own buying experience based on what they need when they want it. When you want to sell doesn't really matter,

Let's assume you are entering your second or third year of SEO. You have a well-optimized site, a company blog that posts two new posts a week, a decent social media presence and a solid link portfolio. You might think that you can ride the success of your previous SEO efforts for a few months, or even for most of 2012, but easing off on your SEO means the competition can catch up a lot faster than you realize. Before you know it,

For small to mid-sized businesses that don't have $10k to drop on PPC every month, there is still some search marketing value to be had from launching a PPC campaign, even if you can only spend a minimal amount. In my experience, organic SEO produces much more long-term results than PPC, but certain elements of PPC can actually enhance your SEO.

Just last week, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land reported the latest Google algorithm update which targets ad heavy websites. As Google's official blog post announcing the page layout algorithm says, the update affects "' sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. Matt Cutts warned that this update was coming back in November at PubCon.

On-site optimization has become more important than ever to capitalize on changing user search behavior and the new search algorithm updates. Aged and established B2B sites that had never done any previous SEO have the luxury of a strong search engine trust factor, something that only time can bring. A little onsite SEO and they see dramatic results relatively quickly.

While the same white hat SEO guidelines should apply to all websites regardless of size, larger websites )think 1,000+ pages( face a unique set of challenges that smaller website may not have to deal with.