By Ben Wills

I still hear people ask “What’s the point of Social Media?”

I still hear people say “Social Media is a waste of time, and new marketers’ playground.”

I hear people talk about the value of Social Media for businesses. And they have no idea what they’re talking about.

But the absolute worst of all is this: They don’t know, that they don’t know, that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Ontolo-what?

An ontology is a way to observe things or systems, and to organize these observations for use in a more powerful way. For your business, this “more powerful way” will be to ultimately contribute to the survival of your business.

By Reynaldo Villar

Yes, it’s true. The Internet has brought the WHOLE world to your doorstep. But what if you only want to focus on local prospects?

That’s a challenge many entrepreneurs and business owners have faced as they’ve tried to establish a website presence. You know that your website can be an effective marketing tool. But prospects from states, counties or parts of the country you don’t service could just as well be from Madagascar.

You can’t really filter out the rest of the world from your website. But I’ve got five FREE tips for you to attract more local web shoppers.

All five rely on various elements of search engine optimization (SEO), today’s big Internet buzzword. But for many entrepreneurs, SEO is just a tekkie term for fine-tuning your website so that search engines will rank you higher when prospects are searching the Internet for what you sell.

By Chad Klingensmith

The QUESTION:

For the duration of 5 year web marketing career I have been asked the same question. How do I get my website ranked higher? How do I get more traffic? Or sometimes, almost incredulously, how do you get websites ranked higher? In the modern day of ultra-sophisticated borderline artificially intelligent search engine algorithms (formulas Google and the other the other search engines use to rank websites) this question could be considered along the lines of “what is the meaning of life”….anybody who understands search engine holistically knows there is no one right answer for marketing a website.

By Patricia Kendall

This is a question I recently heard from a client and at first my reaction was – Dah! -of course you need a website what are you thinking?

The client is in the medical device industry and has a consumer site with the goal of promoting their particular medical device. This site is a few years old and they utilize a variety of marketing tactics including PPC to drive traffic and encourage visitors to request more information. The question “do I even need a website?” surfaced because it is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of the website. Potential patients do not go to this site and select a medical device and then place it in a shopping cart to be shipped to them. This audience is prescribed a device by their physician. This particular client wants to reach potential patients and empower them to have a voice in what device they are prescribed and ultimately implanted with.

By Linda Bustos

Are those really your conversion rates?

Do customers actually find your site using that keyword?

Are you sure that Digg story sent you all that traffic?

Google Analytics may be lying to you, even though it tells the truth — simply because you’re not telling it how to track your site effectively. Are you guilty of any of the following?

Heads Up: All inks open up in new windows, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Tracking Too Much

1. Tracking Your Own IPs

Google Analytics allows you to set up filters for any IP that you don’t want to track. You should consider adding a filter for any user who doesn’t represent your target audience – including company employees’ home computers, the office IP block, SEOs and other web consultants and, if you can identify them, competitors! There are a number of problems tracking unnecessary IPs causes:

By Ann Stanley

PPC mistakes – why we make them!

Pay per click is becoming more sophisticated and complicated. The PPC search engines are bringing out new tools and features to help you manage your PPC campaign or target particularly customers. This new PPC functionality is great for the experienced Google Ad Words Professional (GAP) – yet every day more companies are opening their first pay per click account – with little or no experience.

As a Google Ad Words Professional, a PPC practitioner and an internet marketing consultant; I am amazed how often I come across companies that have no basic online advertising knowledge and consequently make the most fundamental PPC mistakes. This article will attempt to identify the most common errors made when using pay per click advertising; but it will also explain how to manage your PPC account to avoid them!

By Kelly C. Jones

If you know anything about SEO you know that blogs are inherently SEO friendly. They have a lateral navigation that is conducive to indexing, they include keyword tags, they frequently have inbound and outbound links, they have subscription and syndication capabilities and it is a way to update content to your site continually without having to have much technical knowledge.

The hang up with blogs is that sometimes they aren’t right for every business. If you’re blogging for business, the goals for your blog should be defined before you invest too many resources blindly. For SEO purposes, and getting noticed, blogs can help increase traffic to your site. Many times owners are too busy running their business to put the effort into search engine optimization and an online presence with authority. That is why as an SEO consultant it’s your job to get creative. You must step outside the blog box in order to generated excitement from the client about making the commitment to continually invest time into updating their site. So I present to you 7 ideas that are non-blogs, but take advantage of all the blogging benefits.