Article spinning, keyword stuffing, excessive bookmarks, paid links, thin content, duplicate content, excessive blog commenting, etc. were once widely regarded as acceptable SEO tactics. Now these tactics can land you in big trouble with Google. For example, more than 400,000 websites were penalized by Google in January according to this webmaster support video from Matt Cutts. Thanks to Google's Panda and Penguin updates, nothing about SEO is quick, easy or cheap which is why the cost of SEO is rising. In fact, if you find a cheap SEO company that promises quick results the best thing you can do for your website is run away. Just this week another major link network was penalized, affecting a large number of business websites. Hiring a cheap SEO company is like paying a high school kid to stand outside of your store and flip a sign or wear a funny outfit. It might attract attention, but it's not the type of attention your business wants.

Billions of internet searches happen every day, yet people do look to other sources for information and answers. As unlikely or even crazy as it might seem, some people still consult the encyclopedia! In 2010, after 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica went out of print, but encyclopedias live on in DVD format.

If you own a small business or provide some sort of service to the community, whether it’s a local lawyer or a landscaping company, you most likely have a website. But, just having a website is not enough in today’s competitive online world. If you want to be in one of the first 3 spots on Google, Bing and Yahoo you will need an SEO strategy that uses your ability to build links.

Google recently updated their Link Shemes/Unnatural Links document. They did it so quietly that almost nobody noticed. This is strange for Google as they usually have a ton of fanfare when they are making a change to the way their algorithm works. This change in policy didn’t even have a funny animal name to go along with it. Barry Schwartz, editor of Search Engine Roundtable, has a page change tool app set up for the exact URL Google uses to announce changes and it didn’t even catch this change for several days. Does this mean the change in policy is a sign of bigger changes on the way?

There are SEO professionals out there that do not like to brag. They also do not like to use a press release as part of an SEO campaign. But, what they are missing is that it’s OK to brag and it’s definitely OK to diversify your content using things such as a press release.

It's very easy to look at PPC or pay per click advertising and ask how can this be useful for my company. There is so much that goes into it, such as the research, estimating traffic, and the cost per click. Pay per click is sometimes so expensive that how could it be worth it to anyone? These are the questions that many small businesses have been asking themselves for years.

In this day and age it is extremely important for large multi-location businesses and small local businesses to understand the need for a local digital marketing strategy. This ensures that a brand's various locations can be found easily online, which in turn, will generate local leads. Businesses should also go further and create a unique local strategy specifically for social media. It’s not a new idea that social networks prefer localized content and consider this content more relevant than other content. There are several ways to get down to the local level on social networks; we will be focusing on Facebook today, more specifically Facebook targeting.

Facebook announced yesterday they are changing how they rank organic posts that are eligible to appear in a users’ News Feed.

Instead of standing by waiting for Internet service providers to tap the two-thirds of the population without Internet access (see data, below*), Google is working toward servicing those areas with balloon powered Internet. Essentially, 'Project Loon' works like this: balloons are moved around in the stratosphere and sent into a layer of wind that's moving in the right direction, creating a large communications network to which people can connect via an antenna attached to their building. Not surprisingly, Project Loon was founded by MIT-trained scientist, Richard DeVaul.

Have you ever stopped to think about how big Google actually is? Probably not, but think about it this way, Google accounts for about 25% of all consumer internet traffic in North America on an average day. This means that Google really is a force to be reckoned with, because Google is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram combined. Google is busy building data centers as fast as possible, mainly to keep up, as the company accounted for roughly 6% of the Internet’s traffic three years ago.