A non-branded visitor is someone that finds your site by searching for a general keyword in the search engines, as opposed to searching for your brand or products by name. Depending on your industry and niche, someone that finds your site via a non-branded keyword might not be ready to convert the moment they land on your site. Especially in the B2B world, it's hard to build that consumer confidence from one interaction with a potential customer. However,

H tags are like the headlines of your site's content. They tell readers what that page is about and help break up the content into manageable chunks. Not only are H tags a great place to target your most important keywords and help your SEO, they improve the overall user experience of your website by making it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more onsite SEO tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis,

A few months ago I wrote a post for SearchEngineJournal.com called "Why Yellow Pages Will Be Dead in Five Years" after a phone call I had with one of their sales representatives that wanted me to upgrade my account. You can read the full details of our conversation in that post, but the moral of the story is that it wasn't going to be cheap and the benefits were pretty much nonexistent.

Lean white hat SEO during this full day Boston SEO class on May 23 with Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing! This SEO workshop will teach you the most effective white hat SEO strategies to help increase your presence in the search engines and drive more website visitors. This SEO training is perfect for marketing professional, website developers and business owners looking to expand their knowledge of SEO and develop an SEO strategy for own sites.

On Sunday )April 1( I noticed that my email box was rather empty. Now, for some business owners Sunday might be the only day of their week their inbox isn't flooded with emails, but I usually get a decent amount )mostly newsletter subscriber updates(, so to see no new emails was actually unusual for me. After logging into my FuseMail account, it didn't take long for me to realize that not only was I not receiving emails, I couldn't send them either!

While online PR is an excellent source of inbound links, it is also a great way to connect your brand with relevant journalists online. Paid PR distribution sites will let users target specific regions and industries for distribution to ensure that the release is getting sent out to the right audience. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more Internet marketing tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis,

Many websites rely on selling online ad space in order to turn a profit. Some will invest in a Google's AdSense campaign, while others sell ad space for related companies. Many site owners, myself included, have invested thousands of dollars in display advertising in order to build online brand awareness, or maybe even take a more direct marketing approach with it to promote a white paper or webinar.

The SEO industry exists mostly because of Google. Whether we SEO professionals love or love to hate the search behemoth, we all have jobs because of Google. Even whispers and rumors of an algorithm update can have a major impact in the SEO world, because the way we do our jobs is directly influenced by how Google does theirs. So when Matt Cutts, head of Google's search spam team,

Social media marketing and SEO are becoming more and more intertwined as time goes by. The search engines have freely admitted that they look at social signals to influence the SERPs. This means that the more times a piece of content is shared on the social networks the more valuable and trusted it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more social media marketing tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis,

Back in October Google rocked the world of SEO with their announcement that they intended to make search more secure by encrypting search data. When someone who was logged into their Gmail account searched in Google, their search query wouldn't be sent over to the site owner whose site they visited, protecting their privacy. Site owners and SEO professionals alike where less than thrilled with this announcement.

A problem I have run into with many website owners during the keyword research phase of their SEO campaign is that they are hesitant to incorporate new keywords into the mix. They have a core list of 10 keywords they want to rank well for and want to know why those keywords can't be targeted on every page of the site. Surely the more times those keywords are used the better, right? Here is the thing, sure,

B2C content recycling is an excellent way to take one piece of B2C content, say a press release announcing the opening of a new restaurant, and re-purpose it across a variety of online platforms to gain more online brand exposure and increase it's SEO value. The key is to keep the messaging the same regardless of platform. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more content marketing tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis,

Let me start of by saying that I think LinkedIn is a fantastic social platform, especially for B2B companies. I have been an active, paid member since 2005 and have invested a lot of time and effort into building my personal profile and network, as well as the Brick Marketing company page. I am an active member of 30+ groups where I submit content from this and the Brick Marketing Blog daily. I am also an "Open Networker,

Since the B2B buying cycle is usually much longer than the average B2C buying cycle, building a real relationship with your potential customers is crucial to earning their business. It's important that your company's Internet marketing campaign )including content marketing and social media marketing( hits people at different points in the sales process, reminding your target audience of why they should work with your company.

B2B websites have to be sure to include those long tail, niche industry keywords in their B2B keyword research. Even if those keywords don't have a high search volume, it's important that your website be positioned well for when someone does search for those B2B keyword phrases. Someone using those highly targeted keywords is most likely your exact target audience. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more keyword research tips and advice,

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.