Category: Search Engine Optimization

Last Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it reached a settlement with Google. The search engine giant has been accused of displaying advertisements to illegal online pharmacies in Canada. The size of the settlement? A whopping $500 million. You read that correctly. Google settled with the Justice Department for half a billion dollars. This is a…

Search engines have always taken a close look at urls. Website owners know if they can get their target keywords in their url they have struck gold. How do you structure them though? One of the biggest debates is whether you should use hashes or underscored to separate your words. Matt Cutts reveals the best…

For years, the Justice Department has been taking a crack at websites that promote illegal online gambling services. Advertisers seem to think they could get a free pass by keeping an arm's length between themselves and the casinos. Not anymore. New Developments in the War on Online Gambling The FBI and the IRS have been…

Holding social media contests is an excellent ways to promote your business online. When you hold a social media contest, you make your blog or social network much more engaging. However, there are many laws associated with running a social media contest that you need to consider. Why Are Social Media Contests Regulated? I bet…

Employers have instituted many social media policies they expect their employees to abide by. They want to make sure when their employees are behaving themselves properly when they log onto Facebook or Twitter. Employers assumed they had every right to place restrictions on their employees behavior online. However, the National Labor Relations Bureau has stated…

Social media is becoming more and more important to search engine optimization (SEO). As our guest experts Scott Polk and Sarah Carling of ObsidianEdge explained a few weeks ago, smart marketers should be aware of the crossover between the two forces, and be actively using their social media presence to create better SEO (largely via…

Google kicked off 2011 with a bang, launching its “Panda” or “Farmer” algorithm update in late February, which has had online marketers scrambling ever since to master the new search engine landscape. As if that wasn’t enough to shake up the SEO world, Google Panda isn’t a one-time update. Since Google has updated Panda about…

Being new to affiliate marketing can be challenging. Knowing what to do can be as important as knowing what not to do. Here's a guide of what not to do, starting with a look at “SEO software,” which really doesn’t exist. Why there’s no such thing as SEO software Beginners to online marketing often search…

Writing effective titles and headlines for the articles and blog posts that make up your site’s content is an important part of SEO. It’s also the basic test of whether or not your content will be read. Think about it: The headline is the first impression everyone gets of your content. If your headlines are…

What site analytics do you look at in your weekly website check? In other words, when you do your weekly quality control performance, what are the site metrics you use to gauge your online success? If that question stumps you, then you’ve come to the right place. The truth is, it can be hard to…