Historically, search has been a major source of traffic and leads for businesses leveraging online marketing. Search is still a huge source of customers , but slowly, social media is gradually increasing in importance as a marketing platform. The important distinction to make is that search and social are not competitive forces. The key to understanding that search and social media marketing need to work together is to think about the problem both search and social solve: information discovery. Ways to Integrate Search and Social Media Marketing. MORE >>

It doesn’t need to be so much difficulty if you take away a few powerful lessons on search engine optimization, such as these three common mistakes. Trying To Optimize A Page For More Than One Keyword. Optimizing a page for more than keyword is a simple and common mistake to make. That’s the wrong way to go though – You end up in a world where all of your pages are competing with each other in the search engine’s eyes to be the most important page on your site for that keyword. Connect with HubSpot Was it your website ? MORE >>

Without a marketing strategy you won’t be able to optimize and measure your inbound marketing efforts. Basic website principles go a long way: Easy to navigate, professional appearance, search engine friendly, mobile ready, easy to update. internet users regularly use a social network” “20% of monthly Google searches are for local businesses” Step 4: Convert traffic to leads Leverage your website in order to get the visitor’s information and start them through your sales process. “A blog gets you 55% more traffic!” MORE >>

Many of the same principles apply to optimizing a blog for search as for optimizing a business website : use keywords in the body copy, post titles, subheadings, permalink URL, image alt tags and meta tags. But a blog also presents additional opportunities for search optimization beyond those that apply to standard websites (which is why Google loves blogs ). Take advantage of these six techniques to help get your blog ranked highly in relevant searches, and increase your overall web presence. Fresh content. Syndication and blog directories. Clean code. MORE >>

HubSpot yesterday launched a “completely re-envisioned and rebuilt” version of its marketing system at its Inbound 2012 user conference. This is a major expansion beyond HubSpot’s original focus on “inbound marketing” to attract leads. Specific changes include: - a new contact database that is much more flexible than the original HubSpot database, allowing access to all types of email and landing page interactions within HubSpot and to social media activities imported to the system. So far as I know, HubSpot is the only marketing automation system using HBase. MORE >>