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.

Recently, Google introduced Carousel for local search results. Now, when you search for a local business like a hotel or restaurant, the results appear in an interactive carousel at the top of the page. Click on one of the results in the carousel and you'll see the address, photos, overall review-based score and links to the actual reviews.

Some might wonder what an SEO does or what it means, sometimes SEOs wonder the same thing. The simple answer is that an SEO optimizes your website to make it appear higher in the search engine page results or SERPs. If you didn't just figure it out SEO stands for search engine optimization, therefore as an SEO we are the optimizers. With that said what do the best of the best say are the most important search ranking factors for now and in the future? Moz, formally known as SEOmoz has released a preview of some of the data from their search ranking factors survey they produce every year or two. This year Moz surveyed 120 SEOs on various ranking factors.

89% of marketers say that social media generates more business exposure. That number alone should tell you that there is something to social media marketing. It’s the new kid on the block when it comes to online marketing, yet there are so many people saying this type of marketing is having a major impact on lead generation and sales. It’s great that marketers can say this about social media, however what do the hard numbers tell us? Social Media Examiner recently released it’s social media marketing industry report and Wishpond went on to do an Infographic on the topic to give a nice illustration of the study’s results.

Several studies from many different sources indicate that search engine optimization reaches more people on a daily basis than social media and pay per click advertising combined. As of 2012 Internet users conducted 1,873,910,000,000 searches on Google alone. That averages out to 5,134,000,000 searches per day. This is a staggering number and there was a study done by Forrester, which discovered that 54% of people found websites through organic search results otherwise known as results done through SEO. The second most preferred discovery method was social media at 32%. Pay Per Click or PPC came in at only 18% as a discovery tool for websites. The confusing part of this equation is that paid search spending is still on the rise.