By Daniel Goldstein

Unless you have been living under a digital rock, you probably know the increasing importance of social-media marketing to your business both today and in the future. However, it is important to know that social media is not a panacea – it is not a magic bullet that will get you a quick million dollars in sales in return. If it were, then every business would be successful within weeks of creating a Facebook page or Twitter account.  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

In February 2011, Google unveiled the first in a major series of updates collectively termed “Panda” to its search algorithm. The latest Panda update occurred on November 18, and many websites lost search-engine rankings (and thereby traffic) on and after that day. See the comments in this post for just a few examples of the many that we have seen.

What the Panda updates aim to do overall is devalue the rankings of poor-quality websites including content farms, spammers, built-for-advertising sites, and those with little original content or text that was copied (or “scraped”) from elsewhere. The most-egregious offenders sometimes have their sites removed from Google’s index completely. In a nutshell, Panda wants to judge the quality of a website from a human point-of-view rather than that of a machine.  Read more...

By Emily Kanter

In today’s holistic, integrated marketing-climate, a press release can now serve many more purposes than just getting a busy New York Times reporter to return your calls, tweets, and/or e-mails. Online press-releases can improve SEO by building backlinks, and sending them through social-media outlets can spread a company’s branding as well. And these are just two of the additional uses.

Still, there are different tactics to remember in order to maximize the effectiveness of an online press-release. In a recent Hubspot webinar entitled “The Science of PR,” the company’s social-media scientist, Dan Zarrella, and PR Newswire’s VP of Social Media, Sarah Skerik, presented valuable data then will tell you when and how to publish online press releases for various purposes.  Read more...

One of the things I’ve always advocated when consulting clients or internally is to measure business outcomes, not just activities.

Digital marketing has actually made tracking actual business results much easier and much more accountable than print or telephone channels.

In digital marketing, this requires web analytics. There are several types of analytics, but the most popular is click-stream, which tracks actual clicks and visits.

Many of us have Google Analytics or other click-stream tracking set up … but many of us probably have never checked it.

This is a huge mistake. By measuring our web data, we can:  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

Keywords are the building blocks of any website whose creators – whether personal or corporate – want to attract a significant level of traffic from search engines (organic traffic, in other words). In a nutshell, if you sell widgets, then you want your website to appear high in results whenever people search for “widgets.”

Defining and implementing a keyword-based strategy, as we will see throughout this ongoing series, is crucial to building and marketing an effective website. The first step, which we will discuss here, is keyword research: For what is your target demographic searching in Google when they are looking for your company’s product or service?  Read more...

After writing my last post about the ROI – the return on inaction –  of social media, one of the commentators challenged me to actually quantify the social media return on investment. This give and take is one of the challenges and benefits of social media. Companies can’t just stand behind pronouncements – they are challenged and forced to strengthen their claims.

The interesting thing about the question of “What is the ROI of Social Media” is that we can track this in ways that weren’t trackable with traditional marketing. Despite the fact that many people have difficulty giving real numbers to the ROI of social media, it’s actually far EASIER to track than traditional media.  Read more...