You might say we now live in a “Google Economy.” Business is driven by search engines – yet many businesses still don’t understand how to value their search marketing.

Ever wonder what an “organic” (unpaid) search engine click might really be worth to you? For that matter, ever wonder how many clicks you might gain by moving from the #5 spot to the #1 spot on a Google search engine result page (SERP)?
Where Our Numbers Come From
In 2006 AOL released more than 30 million search queries originating from more than 600,000 AOL search users. Because AOL didn’t scrub …

One of the largest challenges a business owner faces is capturing the attention of a customer or viewer long enough to tell your story and make them understand what your business is about. Video allows you to do this in a limited space and time. You can tell a lengthy story in a condensed and appealing manner. Video is often seen as a costly endeavor, but short, well planned videos can be put together professionally for under $5000. As business owners, you must always remember the quality of the video and website should be on par with the quality of …

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 …
  Read More…

Quick Response (QR) Codes are the next step in integrating the physical and digital worlds. With a click and an app anyone can use their smartphone to read one of these matrix style bar codes. We have had good luck with i-nigma 4 on the iPhone and QR Droid on the Android OS.

And generating a bar code for a website, phone number, SMS, or block of text can be just as easy. I use http://qrcode.kaywa.com/, but there are many options available.

The QR codes were originally developed by Denso-Wave in Japan to …

Some business owners have found that review sites such as Yelp! and Google Maps can be a boon for business, while others have developed a love/hate relationship with them.

Well, love the fact that customers can go online and express their opinion about an experience with your business or hate the fact that prospects and search engines alike are making reviews a key data point when making decisions about your business, they don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

Read the entire article at www.openforum.com

Here are more acronyms to add to parts 1 and 2.

PPC - Pay Per Click

PPC is one of the three main models of paid online advertisement. In the PPC model you pay the site or service hosting your ad every time someone follows a link placed in the ad. This means that universally appealing teaser ads are actually a bad idea as you will attract clicks from people who will never convert to sales or participants. On the other hand, an add that’s been well tailored to your service will actually cover you through a few false starts …

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 …

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 …

Nowadays information comes at us in a flood. Multiple TV stations run news 24-7, Twitter provides an unending stream of two line summaries of the universe, and no matter what topic interests you, there will never be a dearth of relevant blogs bringing out yet more stats and figures.

Sometimes it would be nice of somebody would just stop and take the time to take all this data that our ever expanding infosphere has made available, and turn it into something understandable.

Worry not: relief is in sight!

Designers and data analysts from around the web have been finding ways to fit …