People in the world of marketing and businesses trying to use social media for promotions almost always face a paradox. It’s like a Chinese finger trap – the harder you pull, the more trapped you can…

There’s a saying in online marketing that has been around for a while. “Content is king.”

The truth is this – before the last year, it really wasn’t. Content has always been important, but it wasn’t until recent updates in Google and…

Let’s call it what it really is, shall we? Despite efforts by Bing/Yahoo to stay relevant as well as efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the search game, there really is only one. For years, I’ve always had to add the caveat when discussing search marketing that “When I say Google, I mean Bing and Yahoo as well.”

I won’t be saying…

Pound for pound, SXSW was a little disappointing this year, at least for search professionals. It's not that there wasn't plenty to do, plenty see, and plenty to hear. That's always going to happen when you're at a conference/festival with speakers…

This past week, I had the pleasure of attending two conferences that were completely different from one another. The week started (well, last week ended) with attending the infamous SXSW conference…

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to dealers and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple…

There’s something that is often missing in marketing and it’s even harder to find when you put the words “social media” in front of “marketing”. It’s God.

It is politically correct to keep religion away from business. We are part of the all-inclusive society where differences are ignored and disagreements are…

There are all sorts of tips, tricks, and techniques to drive more traffic to a blog. They usually involve either paying for it in some way, improving an avenue such as through search engine optimization, or building subscribers. The reality is this – all of these things take time. What doesn’t take time other than the effort that is required to make it happen is…

When it comes to advertising today, things have changed. In some ways it’s due to social media. Oh, who am I kidding? If it wasn't for social media, most brands wouldn't be held as accountable as they are today. Even local businesses, car dealers in particular, rely on social media and review sites to tell their story beyond the cars themselves.

It's all about relationships.

Searching for…

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were…

One of my many search and social conspiracy theories (of which often turn out to be true) is that the Penguin algorithm update on April 24, 2012, was actually two updates. There was a public update that went after low-quality links, splogs, and other SEO linking tactics. This sent shockwaves through the search engine optimization world. Most…

Here's a quick post for you (I know many of my recent posts have been pretty long).

If you have an email database of your customers and prospects and you are using Facebook advertising to promote your page or posts, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be advertising directly to your database. While I don't recommend jumping in headfirst, you…

For the most part, most dealers understand the importance of having content on their websites. They know that search engines love unique content and if they have any hope of ranking well for keywords other than their own name, they need content to help expand their reach.

Things have been changing a bit for the last year. A new type…

In business, there is no such thing as writer’s block. It doesn’t exist. Erase the phrase from your mind. You see, in any business, there are so many potential stories to be told that one should never run out of them even if they’re blogging daily. More importantly, this isn’t like writing a novel. It’s not professional journalism. You’re not writing a column. On a…

There are still many in the search engine optimization industry that are fighting the concept that Google (and Bing) is taking social signals into account at a high level when determining search rankings.

These people fall into three categories:

1. Those who haven’t…

The image above shows the last four Facebook activities by a major car dealership in a metro area. Over three months ago, they abandoned their page. This could easily be a very long post where I go into details about how this is wrong on so many levels, but I'll keep it short because if you're reading this, chances are very strong that you're a savvy dealership…

The idea of the NoFollow attribute on links was to help prevent spam from appearing on user generated content sites, particularly Wikipedia. It was intended as a way to tell Google (and eventually all major search engines) that a link was not supposed to transfer any “link juice” to the recipient of the link. In essence, it was designed to…

This is part 5 in a series about building brand ambassadors at the dealership.

You've gone through all the steps. You knew that we were going to be talking about brand…