A website is only useful if people see it.

The following six strategies are essential in any plan to boost the number of visitors reaching your site.
Gather External Links[1]
This remains the #1 way to improve your search rankings, especially when the links come from trusted and popular sources.
Effective Title Tags
Limit yourself to 70 characters, and put the most relevant keywords near the front. If your brand is a household name, it should come first, otherwise put it at …

Last year Forrester Research found that webpages with videos were 52 times more likely to reach the front page of Google organically (without paying Google for the space) than those without.  It is therefore only natural that someone wanting to improve their web traffic will also be thinking of ways to integrate the video experience.
Thankfully, there are already a number of great articles on this topic:

• Tech Crunch article on how video improves search …
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One of the major benefits of Social Media is how it can significantly improve search engine rankings—if done with SEO in mind.

I have been reading “Social Media for Business—101 Ways to Grow Your Business without Wasting Your Time” and came across a handy table with a list of which social media content gets indexed by search engines and which does not.

It’s important to know what content gets indexed and also to realize that this might change… what gets indexed today might not get indexed tomorrow and vice versa.

Here’s the list from the book (which was published in August …

Earlier this month Google unleashed its newest search innovation, instant search. Every single keystroke will trigger a different search function based on Google’s popular auto-complete function.
What Does Google Instant Change About Searching the Web
Let’s be honest, Google Instant is a wonderful innovation for anyone who likes conducting research online. There is effectively no delay in search time, and your search results will get refined with every single touch of your keyboard. In essence, Google Instant lets you the searcher decide when your results are sufficiently on-task to justify following the revealed links.
What Google Instant Will Do To …

We recently had the good fortune of welcoming Mike Coughlin of WhiteHat SEO to one of our team meetings.  Mike did a wonderful job of laying out the three main elements of any SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign.
1. Research Keywords
At the beginning you research keywords.  A good keyword needs to accurately describe your business.  It also needs to receive search traffic and if you’re going to invest effort in “claiming” a keyword, you need to know that it is possible to displace those websites that appear on the first page of web results.

You can start with just a …

Link building is one of the key elements to Search Engine Optimization.  The more reputable sites you can get to refer people to your site, the better your search engine results will be.  You will usually need a well known and positive reputation in order to garner such links, but there are some small steps you can take on your own to get the ball rolling.
There You Are!
I don’t know about you, but when I first decide where I want to go shopping, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “what’s near me?”  I’d be willing to bet …

WordPress is a great tool to start getting your website optimized for the search engines. Here are some tried and true tips and plugins to seriously consider when optimizing your website or blog in WordPress.

Thesis Theme Benefits Designers and Internet Marketers

Our favorite Wordpress theme is definitely “Thesis”. For both design and SEO purposes we have found it to be the most flexible solution available. With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site.  For instance, you can change size of content areas, build in teasers and thumbnails, …

We have been writing about business blogs lately. We are focusing on using WordPress to produce branded business blogs or blog-sites, leveraging the inherit search engine optimization advantages WordPress provides.

I gave a presentation at the Partners In Success chapter of BNI on 3/17/10 on why blog for business and what MB/I brings to the table. Here’s the narrated version.

MB/I Presentation on Business Blogs
(9-minutes)

Are you already using a blog to market your business? Let us know how it’s working for you.

Are you interested on starting one? Attend our FREE webinar.

If you’re a business owner like me, you may have heard people tell you that you should be blogging. This is probably met with some healthy skepticism on your part, since blogging is for geeks, right? At first I thought the same thing. After all, I thought, I have a Web site. Why should I bother doing a blog? Who reads those blogs anyway?

The truth is that blogging is probably one of the most highly influential activities you can undertake to help your business. Best of all, it’s 100% free marketing once you set it up. Personally, I love “free”. …

As business owners, most of us realize the importance of being “top-of-mind” in our customers’ eyes, and we use e-mail newsletters to tell them about new products or information they may not be aware of. Many businesses that use e-mail newsletters to market to their customers however, miss a huge opportunity to help their own online marketing efforts.

E-mail Newsletters Can Help Your Web Site

Online marketing is often referred to as “search engine optimization” or “SEO” or “internet marketing”. The idea is to get your Web site so it shows up in Google’s index of results on the search engine results …