Reviews are an important part of your business and bottom line. We've already established the impact that reviews have on your business in our previous blog post: HVAC / Plumbing: Importance of Online Reviews for HVAC / Plumbing Industries. If you want to start taking action to build your online review presence,...
With only 12% of consumers saying that they take NO notice of online reviews, doesn't it seem obvious for your company to have a well-rounded online reputation to succeed? Customers are sharing their opinion and experiences online more than ever. Review sites have become an integrated part of the purchasing...
Many people perceive the Penguin algorithm as nothing more than a thug, here to force thousands of small businesses into paid advertisement on Google by tanking their organic visibility. So I’m sure you can imagine the unrest within the community as the one year anniversary of the last update passed. But on Friday (October 17th, 2014), webmasters finally got their wish – Google began rolling out Penguin 3.0. Whether or not it was what they had hoped for is yet to be determined.
It was exciting while it lasted, but unfortunately, Google authorship is no longer supported by Google. But first, allow me to shed a little light on the rise and fall of Google’s authorship markup. The Google authorship rich snippet was first introduced by Matt Cutts at the SMX Advanced conference, back in 2011. For those unfamiliar with this rich snippet; it allowed you to identify yourself as the author of the content within a blog post, which would then publish a small thumbnail of your Google+ profile photo directly to the left of your blog post snippet within Google’s search results.
On July 3, 2014, Matt Cutts declared to the search community that he was going on leave for 4 months, all the way through October. Upon hearing the news, I had a big sigh of relief. For you see, I thought to myself, “There is absolutely no way Google is going to launch any algorithms or make any significant updates to their existing algorithms while the face of their search quality department was on leave of absence.” I mean, who are SEO’s going to yell at and blame for all of their woes while he is away, right? Well, I was wrong...
[caption id="attachment_2226" align="alignleft" width="240"] Pamela Muldoon, iMarket Solutions & Rand Fishkin, MOZ[/caption]
Recently I attended the Content Marketing Retreat on Whidbey Island in Langley, WA. This is the fourth consecutive year for this retreat, sponsored by the Langley Center for New Media and...
All right, so maybe Google's Penguin 2.1 algorithm update isn't nearly as scary as the picture above. But with Halloween right around the corner, would you expect anything less?
Go ahead, share it with your friends - you know you want to.
[socialize service='twitter'] [socialize...
Today marks Google’s 15th anniversary. And with birthdays come birthday presents. But oddly enough, Google has decided to give us all a gift instead, by announcing a brand-new algorithm: the Google Hummingbird algorithm. However, the Google Hummingbird algorithm is unlike previous algorithm updates such as Panda,...
Google and Bing have confirmed that social media activity is taken into account when determining your website’s search engine ranking, but Microsoft is looking to make its search engine the most social way to find what you are looking for on the web. Bing has introduced a panel on the far right of its search engine interface known as the “social sidebar”. This panel contains social media updates from Facebook, Twitter and more.
Unnatural linking is a no-no. Google has made this very clear for quite some time. And yet, even until this day, there are many professional search engine optimizers (SEOs) who simply refuse to believe it. Although many SEOs acknowledge the perils of unnatural linking, they nevertheless continue their black hat...
As an SEO (search engine optimizer) with years of experience at multiple successful SEO companies, I have had the pleasure of optimizing hundreds of websites. Local, national, international; services focused, informational and e-commerce – I have worked on them all. And in that time, my points of contact at these...
As terrifying as it may sound, it is true: keyword cannibalization DOES exist! Even in this modern day and age, websites are falling prey to this foul act left and right. And the scariest part? Webmasters don’t even know what’s happening to them. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can change your...
Practically all of us in the Internet marketing industry have heard the phrase, “content is king”, but just because you have written relevant content for your website does not make it worthy of the 1st position in Google search results (a.k.a. the throne). Sure, your website’s content may rank decently for some...
June 07, 2011 marks a significant date in the history of Google. Othar Hansson, a software engineer at Google, announced via the Google Webmaster Central blog the introduction of authorship markup in Google’s web search. Experts on search engine optimization and Google’s algorithms could immediately foresee the importance of this feature. But interestingly enough, Google’s authorship markup has flown under the radar for quite some time. To help shed light on the value of Google’s authorship markup, allow us to elaborate on the history of authorship and its perceived benefits.
Earlier this morning, Google publicly announced the release of Google’s local carousel feature in English to desktops within the United States. Until today, the local carousel has only been available to some Nexus and iPad tablet users. Having been initially introduced back in December, 2012, we think it is safe to say the feedback for the local carousel was positive enough for Google to want to roll out such a significant design change to their search results. However, it does seem Google is still only taking baby steps, as Google’s carousel is only being displayed for specific types of local businesses.
We love blogging for our clients - but we also love it when you take a little time to get involved to add personal touches to the blogs to make them even more share-worthy.
One of our newly launched clients, Lee's Foodservice Parts & Repairs went the extra mile this week and wrote their own blog post that involved some history, a famous gangster, and a speakeasy... and the post still had to do with a service call to install a walk-in cooler in Chicago! Here's an excerpt from the post to grab your interest:
As a business owner serving a specific geographic area, you should have a listing on Yelp.com. Once that listing is claimed and verified by you or your SEO team here at iMarket Solutions, you have access to several tools in the back end of the site. Yelp announced a new tool available as of Monday March 25th to help business owners even more!
As promised, we raffled off a SHINY NEW iPAD to one of our booth visitors today at Mechanical Systems Week 2012!
We congratulate Frank Weaver of Home Comfort Experts for his win today! Home Comfort Experts is located in Indiana - we were so glad to meet Frank today and hand over his NEW iPAD! Check out the video below!
We will be at booth 530 ready to talk about how iMarket Solutions can help you have a dominating web presence for your HVAC or Plumbing website. Come by, learn how you can get more leads for your business AND leave us your card to be entered into our daily iPad Giveaway Drawing! Special conference pricing to all attendees!
Imagine you are enjoying a nice walk in the park and someone snatches your smartphone right out of your hands! How would you feel? Would you do this to someone else?
These seem like silly questions. The answer to all is generally, “of course not!” However, on the Internet, it seems like many have let the rules slide a bit with copying content from other websites.
