by Brian Dean Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Jayson DeMers Volkswagen has embarked on a new bid to capture an even larger piece of the pie in the American auto marketplace, and Internet marketing techniques are playing a big role in that campaign. Let's face it, if your company was founded by Hitler , you start off with a public relations deficit that to most of us might seem insurmountable. But Volkswagen )German, "people's car"( did a spectacular job of erasing that deficit with the Beetle in the 50s and 60s.

by Stoney deGeyter I'm convinced that all bloggers are narcissists. Not in the when-I'm-president-I-will-fix-the-world kind of way. Much more subtle than that. But nonetheless, bloggers write expecting people to care about what they write. Remember when we used to keep our diaries under lock and key? Now they are published on the WWW for the world to see and share. If you're not yet a blogger but are thinking of blogging, you're probably even more of a narcissist. Why?

by Chris Warden Local Search Ranking Factors Google Places Listing One of the main ranking factors in local search is an optimized listing using some of Google's own properties, most notably Google Places . Fill out the standard information first, such as: Business name Address Phone number Hours of operation Contact email Website address Fill out all the information required. An incomplete profile certainly isn't doing you any favors. Your goal, above all else,

by Jason Corrigan One of the largest constraints for most organic search and digital marketing campaigns is a lack of resources needed to advance search rankings and visibility. Whether it is a limited amount of time, money, man power, or all of the above; businesses always lose when they are unable to create fresh, unique content on a regular basis.

by Mike Fleming There's an old adage that says " The pain of losing is twice as strong as the joy of winning ." This principle can help your business if you use it wisely. Even the threat of potential loss creates agitation in people that plays a powerful role in their decision making. Psychologists call this the principle of scarcity . It says that humans hold more appeal for things that they perceive will become less available in the future.

by Nick Stamoulis There are many reasons that someone might want to invest in a pre-existing domain. For instance, one of my former B2B SEO clients, a large software company, would occasionally buy up smaller companies and enfold that second company's products into their own software line. Eventually Company B's website would be "sunsetted" and redirected to the new product pages on my client's site, giving those new pages a valuable SEO boost.

by Chris Warden Understanding the Browsing Habits of Mobile Users When optimizing for local search, it's important to remember that you are essentially optimizing for mobile. Mobile users are on the go, and they aren't searching for the sake of searching. They're looking to buy. When you're searching for a restaurant on your smartphone, you typically aren't doing it for the future. You're hungry now, and ready to eat. This applies across all mobile/local searches.

by Mike Moran We've all seen that look on the face of the boss. It says, "What on earth are you talking about?" Sometimes that look is something we deserve to see, because we really don't know what we are doing, but often, it's because we just have something to say that the boss doesn't understand. Recently, a client asked me how she can wipe that look off the her CMO's face every time she starts talking about measuring Web conversions and offline conversions.

by Chris Warden What's Local SEO? When the term "local business" is thrown around, it doesn't mean the mom and pop shops in small town America. Local business is merely a term that means, if you search for a specific business in a specific area, you'll find a location close to you. McDonald's is a local business. So is Verizon. These businesses are huge, but when searching for specific establishments in a specific area, it's all local search.

by Stoney deGeyter If you were ever going to tell a "back in the day" story about SEO, it would have to include a discussion of meta tags. Long before links were built, before content was king and before social was sharable, meta tags were optimized. Meta tag optimization is the original SEO. But gone are the days when throwing long lists of keywords into a couple of meta tags could move your site to the first page of Alta Vista, Excite or Webcrawler. For that matter,

by Jayson DeMers When SEO goes local, there are a few new rules that savvy webmasters need to follow. The good news is that census data is readily available and can provide a lot of information to customize and tweak SEO. Along with big data that's available for a reasonable fee )or free(, it's important to use the information that's available to maximize search engine results. Here are 5 easy ways to put census data to work. 1.

by Mike Fleming In the offline world, you wouldn't invest tons of money in a sloppy-looking, incorrect-grammar-ing, confusing, and unknowledgeable salesman that wasn't able to serve your customers needs in the ways they wanted to be served, would you? So, why would you do it online? Would you like to buy something from this guy? The truth is, your website is your digital sales rep. It's the go-to "person" in the online world for customers looking for your solutions.

by Mike Moran SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly expect that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you'd be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients believe so fervently in SEO that they aren't actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you'll likely regret looking so narrowly at SEO.

by Nick Stamoulis I came across this great article on Search Engine Watch a while back and I was blown away by this statistic; While a mere 8 percent of search engine clicks come from paid search, 89 percent of the search budget is invested in search engine marketing. Conversely, while 92 percent of search engine clicks are organic in origin, a mere 11 percent of the search engine budget is invested in organic search.

by Brian Dean When it comes to building links... ...you've probably heard it all. That's why I'm not going to show you any "secret" or "underground" link building strategies today. But what I will do is teach you how to take tried-and-true link building techniques - like guest posting and broken link building - into hyperdrive. In short, you'll learn how to get more links with less work. #1: Take Press Releases to The Next Level With.

by Mike Fleming When people shop, whether online or offline, there is always a measure of uncertainty throughout the buying process. Typically, the uncertainty fades as the buyer journeys through the process of researching their purchasing decision. They gather facts about what they need, look at features, benefits, quality, pricing and so on.

by Nick Stamoulis When I read Jennifer Cario's post here on Search Engine Guide about Coca-Cola and social media sales the other day I was struck by one paragraph in particular; What you CAN do however is leverage that uber-popularity into a communications channel that allows you to introduce new products and track the impact social media marketing has on THOSE products.

by Stoney deGeyter When it comes to on-page optimization, the title tag of any given web page is the single most important piece of optimizable real estate there is. Think of it as beach front property off the Florida Keys. Unlike other areas of a website, the optimizable space in the title tag is extremely limited but has great search visibility, which means it can really pack a punch! In fact, aside from a site's total architecture,

by Nick Stamoulis Over the years I've found that's it easy enough to explain to someone what they should do with their link building campaign-the types of links they're looking for, how to build a 12 month strategy, how to evaluate the quality of a link and so forth-but where a lot of site owners and marketing managers get hung up isn't with the actual building of links, it's usually because of the attitude and mindset they have when they start their link building campaign.