Google has been one of the leading forces in the search engine industry for several years now and it seems like everything they do tends to set the trend for other search engines. Over the years, they have implemented several new algorithm changes that have effectively slapped webmasters down the rankings when they engaged in things Google didn’t approve of. The latest Google slap dealt with individuals who used unnatural linking practices to achieve higher rankings. Many webmasters in this category have been negatively affected and are unsure of where to turn from here. MORE >>

0 (Photo credit: Wikipedia). While I am usually preaching differentiation to large businesses , I have been working with a lot of small businesses lately in my workshops and online courses. Seems like 2012 is the year that a bunch of small businesses decided to get serious about digital. And some of them aren’t always happy about my advice, because their differentiation has always been about their location. If you own a retail store or a local service business, your marketing has probably been lame, but you’ve never had to pay for that before. Let me explain. ” Well, OK. MORE >>

This week, a new free social media tool called Klouchebag hit the web. If you haven't played around with it already, it's a tool that tells you how. annoying you are on Twitter. Yeah, we'll just go with "annoying" for the sake of this blog post. But it got me thinking: social media can be chock full of valuable content, but it's often buried among the mundane and useless social media updates, or hidden behind poorly constructed social media profiles. And this makes a marketer's job mighty hard. So this post is going to outline all of the worst offenders we've seen in social media. What gives? MORE >>

Pay  Careful Attention to the Upper Right hand Corner of Google Search Results. If you have recently checked your category’s Google search results, you may well have been as surprised as was when I recently checked  our first page placement in the  ‘content marketing’  topic. In weeks and months past, text ads would have appeared in the upper right-hand corner. Those ads still appear, but they have been bumped down by a gigantic Google+ area that features 2 content marketing gurus,  Joe Pulizzi and Brian Clark. cannot imagine that advertisers are overly pleased by that. Yikes! MORE >>

The savviest of inbound marketers know that content creation is at the heart of a successful inbound marketing strategy. But if marketers are consistently pumping out tons and tons of content, what you end up with is a cluttered web that will only get more cluttered, right? These days, content discovery is a big problem, both as a user and as a marketer. Your audience is constantly struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff, and as a marketer, you're always looking for ways to make sure your content gets in front of the eyes of that audience. Well, here's one more for ya! MORE >>