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 …

Excuse me.  I couldn’t help noticing that strange and interesting plant.

• Little Shop of Horrors

Unfortunately, we do not all work at Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists.

Putting a strange and interesting plant in your window (or on your website) will not drive web traffic all on its own.

If nobody passes your window, then no one can see what’s there, nor can they tell their friends and acquaintances.

What you need is an integrated strategy that both uses your website as an asset and uses your other assets to draw attention to your website.  Here are some things to consider before working on your strategy:

• Do …
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Flash, well known for its elegant moving images and animations, is the application of choice for creating beautiful websites. But many web developers have scrapped the idea of using Flash for business websites because text that is created in Flash is not always easy to recognize by search engines like Google. Search engine optimization has been, and continues to be, a priority for many businesses. So many web developers have gotten into the habit of settling for two alternatives: the less elegant look of a completely HTML site or a hybrid in which only some of the site elements, …

Repetition can be a very good thing for Google.  It can also be a very bad thing.  It depends on what you are repeating and where you are repeating it.

As I discussed previously, anything that is worth saying once is worth saying again.  Google looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on the same page, and uses this to determine what the page is about.

Google also looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on multiple pages.  It uses this form of repetition to identify duplicate content, which it will then omit from its indexing.

This is actually …

Search engines like honesty.

If only one out of every three sites that Google returns on a search for Free Internet Consultation actually offers free internet consultations, it reflects poorly on Google, especially if another search engine can do better.

While it is certainly possible to stump the public with the truth (and the TV Show To Tell The Truth gives us plenty of examples), do you really want to convince your target audience that you’re exactly like the people who are pretending to do what you do?

Something Only an Expert Would Know

One of the things that the judges in To Tell …

Two weeks ago Google announced “Rich Snippets,” a new campaign on their part to categorize frequently sought items. The four main categories they are focusing on at this time are people, businesses, products, and reviews.

What Google recognizes right now is patterns of letters. It cannot be said to truly understand them as words, let alone understand how they interact relative to each other. Perform a search for “Marissa Berger” and you will get a mix of company websites and individual social media profiles from different Marissa Bergers all across the country.

Rich Snippets will eventually give Google the …