If you are the owner of the Google Local Listing, claim it. Claiming your listings is an opportunity to be found by more people in more places. People are searching for local businesses. Google has integrated their local search into the main organic search results becoming the first thing searchers view. Otherwise, anyone including your competitor can claim your Google Local Listing and hijack the account. The hijacker finds the listing...

Do you ever wonder the factors that impact your search results? How does web traffic reflect your web site rank? Traffic has a direct impact to your web site’s rank among Google search results. The higher the rank, the more traffic you get. There are specific algorithms that Google and other search engines use to rank web sites, which are secretly guarded. Google uses over 200 ranking factors. SEO involves tailoring your website to...

Google has recently introduced a new pay feature to Google Places. This feature, known as tags, allows you to add extra information to your listing in Google maps and displays a small tag on the map, next to your business. This is useful for things like coupons and sales. It is a useful marketing tool in general, but the question is, is it worth the cost? Google tags costs $25 a month, kind of steep for a little yellow tag (see above.) The...

When search engines were younger, it was easier to achieve high search engine rankings by using unethical SEO methods. Methods like keyword stuffing were used in the late 1990′s for unsophisticated search engines. It involved “stuffing” pages with keywords to achieve a higher ranking. Today stuffing pages with keywords has a negative impact. Google imposes penalties for unethical tactics like this one. Search marketers...

In 2009, News Corp took on Google. News Corp dislikes the fact that Google provides access to News Corp’s massive amount of content without paying for it. News Corp is threatening to block Google from indexing News Corps’ web sites and is negotiating a deal with Microsoft to provide exclusive search engine access to web content on Bing. Under the deal Microsoft would pay News Corp for access, which is reportedly still under...