It's a common problem especially with new businesses. You want everything you do and everything you can do to be out there in the public eye. But consider this. If I can't look at your website and determine what one thing you do well, neither can Google! Niche marketing a necessary small business strategy. Understand what you do really well and market that! Don't go after the larger competition with everything they do. Go after the one thing you know you can beat them up on!

Every time I have to create a social media page, I have to look these sizes up. Here is a resource that will give you all the information in one place. Be sure to book mark this page!

Reuben H. Donnelley created the first official Yellow Pages directory in 1886. About a hundred years later the Yellow Pages saw inklings of its demise. Google's official birth date is September 27, 1998. And since we're into a mild history lesson - the internet as "www" originated around 1992. What made the internet so powerful was availability of information. What made Google so powerful was the ability to find the information you needed. What made it all possible was the personal computer.

I've said it many times to clients, don't try to game the system. You might get some short term gains but in the end, you'll get caught. It's not like the internet police will put you in jail but you're gonna think that's where your website is if you don't play by the rules. In the end it has been and always will be about good, authoritative content, easy navigation, informative inbound and outbound links and common sense.

Dear Google, I know in the age of political correctness you've taken the position of non-partisan, non-religious, non-white to the point where your absence may appear to be contempt for the very people you need in order to keep your business thriving.

There's no question that a lot of changes happened related to Google searches last year with PANDA and other updates. Some of these changes were quite subtle and very far reaching. How Google intuitively handles local search is a great example.

If you're like many of my clients, you struggle with what you have to do to generate a phone call. Let's assume you're getting 500 visits to your site in a month. Do you know how many clients that is actually generating. No matter what your answer, it can always be more!

Sometimes you have neither the money nor the time to create prefessional looking web graphics. And for myself, I can't draw a stick figure. I can get by in Photoshop (Elements...) but no matter how much I try, the results still appear somewhat amateur-ish. Here's a great tip for anyone using Microsoft Office...thank you Hubspot.

Remember MySpace...the darling of social media? It was free but in my opinion, the complexity killed it. When something came along that did what MySpace did but was far simpler to use, MySpace was history. In my opinion, Facebook took off because of its simple form driven motif that everyone could grasp.

We know Google’s algorithm changes daily. Some insist that the reason is so no-one becomes complacent with their rankings. A well run business demands a predictable environment. However, an excellent business in today’s market must also know how to deal with change. Google is part of that changing landscape. By maintaining a modest pay-per-click account, any business can hedge their bets against the less than predictable changes in the Google landscape. But let’s give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that their changes are evolving to a more quality driven search.