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While the media used to reach customers may have changed dramatically over the last several years, there are some things that haven’t changed in the world of marketing: before you can sell your product or service, you first have to engage your target audience. And in order to engage that audience, you must reach out to them where they live. And today, the vast majority of people live online.

It’s axiomatic that every business must have an attractive, well-organized, and well-structured website rich in information. It must contain the relevant keywords so that it can rank as high as possible on all search engines, and it needs to have as many inbound, outbound, and internal links as possible.

Most important, it must include useful and original content that will resonate deeply with its intended audience. By maintaining a blog that targets potential customers’ interests, a business can position itself as a thought leader and expert in a particular industry. Finally, every website must be optimized for mobile and tablet usage, with as much video content as practicable.

For almost twenty years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been used as an online marketing tool. And over that time span, SEO has changed and evolved as search engines, themselves, have grown and matured. The basic fundamentals of SEO are still important, however, and if done correctly will still yield favorable results. Content, performance, authority, and user experience are all concepts that have remained relatively constant.

Perhaps the major change in SEO began about a decade ago when Google became the top search engine and SEO authority, setting the bulk of SEO rules and standards. By changing its algorithms and administering discipline through search engine filters such as Panda and Penguin, Google severely restricted people who were trying to cheat the system by stuffing their websites with keywords or low-quality links in order to achieve high page rankings. Google and other search engines quickly put a stop to that practice, but in doing so, they have diminished the utility of keywords in general.

Over time, then, SEO’s new mantra became “content, content, content.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is an advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays the publisher – typically, the website owner or host – each time one of its ads are clicked on by a potential consumer, surfing the web.

Search engines such as Google and Bing allow businesses to buy listings in their search results. When someone searches on a keyword that is related to a business’s offerings, its ad will show up on as a sponsored link or banner ad on a results page, along with the natural, non-paid search results.

There are two types of PPC advertising – flat rate PPC and bid-based PPC. In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In bid-based PPC, ad placement is sold at auction. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that it is willing to pay for a given ad spot based on a keyword. The highest bid has the best chance to appear first in the rankings.

Whether utilizing a f

Advertising is a form of marketing communication used to promote or sell something, usually a business’s product or service, but it can be almost anything that one individual wants to exchange with another in return for money or some other commodity or service. It is said that the practice of advertising began millennia ago – commercial messages and political displays have been found in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia, as well as on ancient wall paintings in Asia, Africa, and South America. The first printed advertisement in English appeared in 1477, the year after William Caxton set up his first press in England. By the middle of the 17th century, British newspapers had adopted advertising as an intrinsic part of their contents. The first daily newspaper in the American colonies devoted as many as ten of its sixteen newspaper columns to advertising.

The “Father of modern advertising” is purported to be one Thomas J. Barrett, a 19th century Londoner, who created an effective advertising campaign for the Pears Soap Company which involved

The biggest mistake that any business or entrepreneur can make is believing that if you build it, they will come. The truth is: they won’t. You have to go get them. The second biggest mistake is believing that if you simply close your eyes and shoot enough buckshot, sooner or later, you’re going to bag a customer. Well, you might, but you’ve probably wasted a whole lot of time, money, and energy with that kind of scattershot approach. In order to get the right kind of customer to notice you, and ultimately buy your product or service, you need to use a finely tuned, steadily aimed, high powered rifle. In other words, you need to employ targeted marketing.

Targeted marketing is a type of advertising that is designed to reach those consumers who are most likely to become your customers based on various traits, such as demographic, psychographic, geographic, economic, and other quantifiable types of behavior, such as previous purchasing habits. Targeted marketing allows businesses to eliminate wasted advertising to consumers whose pre

Your Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign needs to be constantly updated if you want it to help you achieve your marketing goals. Some businesses crate a PPC account and then make the mistake of thinking it can run on automatic, not realizing that it has many moving parts and plenty of places where problems can arise. An account audit is simply systematic way to review your account to determine areas that could benefit from anything from a minor tweak to a major overhaul.

Remember: the purpose of an audit is to match your PPC account’s goals with its desired outcomes and to maximize the impact of your ad campaign and, ultimately, your costs per conversion and return on investment (ROI). So, at the very least, you should perform an audit on a yearly basis and then whenever you think it necessary to address any known or suspected performance issues. Most experts recommend that you have an outside agency do the work so that your account can be examined with a fresh eye and from an unbiased perspective.

There are many different audits that you can complete to help ensure that your account

Search engines have replaced encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference books and trips to the library, having become, over the last two decades, everyone’s resource for finding answers and information. By far, the most used search engine in the world is Google. It’s been around since 1997 and is constantly improving with new features and algorithms. In fact, Google’s search engine is so dominant, with approximately 65 percent of the country’s search market share, that the word, itself, has become a verb: to Google something is to search for it online; much like the brand name Xerox once became the active word for photocopying something.

Never to be outdone, computer behemoth Microsoft has had several search engines over the years, including Windows Live Search and MSN Search. Today, it has Bing, which in addition to powering its own searches also powers Yahoo search. Thus, Bing serves the other third of U.S. internet searchers.

Why is Google twice as popular as Bing? It may simply be a matter of habit, since it’s been around longer, because, in reality

There is no point in having a website unless people visit it. And people won’t visit it often enough, if it first doesn’t please Google, who, like it or not, is the most important arbiter of how your website will be ranked. So, while you are indulging in your creative fancies, trying to make you site the most beautiful and technologically sophisticated in the land, you also need to pay attention to grabbing the attention of Google – your new, best friend.

Number one on the list of creating a Google-friendly website is realizing that content is still king – not clever meta tags or sneakily inserted and endlessly repeated keywords. You have to provide unique content that is worth reading, viewing, or listening to, and that is updated regularly. And make sure that your content is original. Google is particularly annoyed when you lift content from another site and try to fool it into thinking that it is truly your own.

The good news is that if you provide unique and useful content, other sites will link to yours. Google likes that and attaches a lot of im

The easy answer to this question is: “As much as necessary and as little as possible.” But, of course that’s the easy answer and in business, there are no easy answers. Some experts suggest that you allocate 15 to 20 percent of your company’s annual income for the best results, but that answer is also a little too facile.

You know that you’re going to spend something for your business’ online presence and you know that it’s probably going to more affordable than print ads, radio or TV commercials, or sending out actual mail. But what you really need to do before you spend a dime, is decide what you want to achieve, where you will find most of your customers, and what aspects of online advertising and communication will give you the biggest bang for the buck by generating leads and sales and directing people towards your company.

Generally, you will have several main choices for your online spending: a website, which requires building it, hosting it and maintaining it; search marketing, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), digital ads such as Google AdWo

Here’s the quick answer: VERY. By 2017, it is estimated that there will be 150 million mobile websites – that’s 149 million more than there were in 2007. With 4 billion mobile phones being used, world-wide, it won’t be long before many people’s first internet experience will be through a mobile device. If your business doesn’t maintain a mobile-friendly website, you are missing the opportunity to attract customers over their mobile phones.

Google has already recognized this shift when it recently rolled out of a major algorithm update that is designed to allow mobile-friendly websites to appear higher in mobile searches, while non-mobile sites will experience lower rankings. So if you want your site to rank high in Google, it is now imperative that it is optimized for mobile.

However, SEO ranking is not the only reason to have a mobile-friendly site. The fact is, that sometime in 2014, mobile usage overtook desktop usage for the first time, ever. If your business’ site is not mobile-friendly, you’re running the risk of losing