by Stoney deGeyter Your competition should play an important role in your research before you move forward with any SEO, PPC, or online marketing campaign. In fact, it's generally a good idea to do a fair amount of competitive research before you build a website or even decide what industry or niche to focus your efforts on. Competitor knowledge isn't the most important aspect of building a successful online business. You still have to be a good manager,

by Stoney deGeyter Every once in a great while, someone comes up with a stellar marketing idea. And, it's not long until that idea is copied, tweaked, washed, rinsed, and repeated. Even now, over a decade later, we still see ripoffs of the "Got Milk?" campaign. Slogans such as "Got Sand?", "Got Jesus?", "Got Fruit?", and "Got Laughs?", are still found on vehicle bumpers as they speed by us on the highway.

by Stone Reuning Besides writing a properly formatted press release for journalists, bloggers and the search engines, you have to distribute it around to various outlets for it to have much impact. Simply posting it on your site will not do much outside giving your site more content to offer the search engines. In order for your company news to make a splash, it needs further distribution. There are essentially two types of press release distribution outlets - paid and free.

by Stoney deGeyter The optimal time to start consulting with the SEO on a new website is at the very beginning. And, I mean the VERY beginning... when the website is just a sparkle in it's dreamer's eye. I was recently consulting with a client who brought us on at the very beginning of a new project. It worked beautifully,

by Mike Moran Image by Jill Clardy via Flickr I frequently advise clients that the secret to successful search engine optimization is to have content that people really want to find. And, beyond SEO, the secret to a successful site is that the same content makes prospective buyers want to read it, and it persuades them to buy what you are selling. It sounds simple, and for some companies, it is simple, but we often make things more complicated than they are.

by Mike Fleming The keyword phrases to use for your PPC account aren't always obvious. A key to great ROI and customer loyalty is to have customers think that you're the only viable solution to their problem at a given time . Therefore, the challenge in keyword research is not coming up with keywords. That's the easy part. You just scan the website and use the product names and there you go...a keyword list.

by Mike Moran People often ask me how to break into international markets. Big companies struggle with this all the time, but the great thing about the Internet is that small companies have a better chance of going global than ever before. But when you're planning that new country Web site, have you thought about search engine optimization? Sure, you want the free traffic, but have you thought through the steps you need to take? It might be more complicated than you think.

by Stoney deGeyter Pricing out SEO services can be a challenge for any business looking to invest in their online marketing efforts. It's difficult because there is no one-size-fits-all pricing metric. It seems that, no matter where you turn, you're comparing apples to oranges when it comes to pricing and services offered between SEO companies. Ultimately everything comes down to hours. How many hours are involved in doing the tasks at hand? To figure that,

by Sage Lewis Have you seen Google Instant? It's the latest development from Google. I can't take the hilarity of it all. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter Over the past few days, I've been playing around with Google Instant and reading a lot about it. There is a pretty broad range of opinion, and I've been drawing some of my own conclusions. Will Google Instant change the face of SEO or PPC? Will it save us time searching? Will people adopt or reject it? Anybody offering opinions on these questions is merely speculating. I've got my own speculations, and I'll share them here.

by Mike Fleming Here is an absolutely delightful new little )but really huge!( feature in Google Analytics that should make anyone interested in improving their web business results smile from ear to ear. It's called Weighted Sort . The problem: You want to find out how your keywords are performing for a particular metric, say bounce rate , because you want to improve the relevance of the visitors to your site. You jump into analytics to take a look at the Keyword Report,

by Stoney deGeyter SEO can be a boring, monotonous job. But, it can also be an exciting detective trail of discovery. The hardest SEO jobs are those that are for websites that are already performing strongly and you're trying to eek out slightly better results. The fun one's are those that have lots of problems, which even the smallest SEO and analytic edits produce huge changes in the results. Unfortunately,

by Stone Reuning Optimizing Company News for the Search Engines Aside from letting the world know about what's going on at your company, press releases also help your company's website build and maintain high search engine rankings. In the past, press releases were only for journalists who may be interested in your company or industry. Now, press releases need to written and formatted with the search engines in mind as well.

by Mike Moran Image via Wikipedia A couple of months ago, I posted on the search engines' so-called " duplicate content penalty ," where pages that contain similar words are often hidden from the search results because the search engines )rightly( conclude that searchers would rather see different pages. Recently,

by Stoney deGeyter Clichés are a funny thing. We don't like to hear them... especially in movies, TV shows, or blog posts, but we frequently use them in everyday conversations. Clichés are a great way to make a point because the meaning of them is pretty much universally understood, even if not entirely true. Just because something is a cliché doesn't mean it can, or should be, disregarded. Here are some clichés that we can use to help us better understand SEO.

by Mike Fleming If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad. You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries. Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order . Then,

by Sage Lewis This is a question I get asked all the time. Get the final answer right here. Inspired from this article at Search Engine Roundtable Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Moran Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid )I still clean out my e-mailalthough I don't reply muchand I still moderate comments on my blog(, I don't write any blog posts )on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide(, and I stay off Twitter. I also don't read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitterit's a social media fast. Each year, it's interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again.

by Stoney deGeyter Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don't, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced. There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely,

by Eric Brown Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble . I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future be any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor,