Happy Valentine's Day, valued WebiMax readers.  Are your customers headed, straight as an arrow, toward your site's services and products, not just today, but each day of the year?  Search engine optimization facilitates a love connection and the endless search for brand attention.  Brands engineer goods and services to meet the needs of valued customers.  Online marketing helps align and spark brand-consumer connections.

Innovation can lead to profitable small and medium business (SMB) growth starting in 2012. This year can be a rebound year for SMBs if business owners commit to innovating and focusing more on client-retention. The key problem is that most business owners are reluctant to move forward due to pressing economic concerns including the financial markets, credit ratings and unemployment; however, it’s the lack of focus on key internal areas that are keeping them in a hover pattern.  Read more

How's your brand getting attention today?  There are in-house and external ways to beckon attention.  Seek search engine optimization information; vendors offer an array of choices, addressing technical, social, and copywriting needs.  Do you want ongoing commerce from customers once you have their immediate attention?  While SEO offers opportunities to drive traffic to your site, your company has the power to make your brand a 'regular hangout,' enjoying endless attention.  That's what you want, right?

Happy weekend, search fans!  You have some time this weekend.  Catch-up on your online marketing/search engine optimization reading.  I've read, synopsized, and delivered links to informative tidbits from around the world of search.  Take a gander at what I've gathered:

Happy Friday!  It's time to put in a day of work and then dine on the fruits of our labor.  Everybody's working for the weekend, right?  Pull some cash out of your account and take a ride on the weekend's ferris wheel.  If you bank with Citibank, you may have recently gotten confused by the numbers.  Sometimes that happens – getting confused about numbers that is, not how much cash is in your account; the latter is a scary thought.

When Facebook filed for its IPO last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, 85 percent of it stemming from advertising. Currently, Facebook solely hosts ads on the standard version of its social media platform. However, the company recently inked a deal with Bango that will bring ads and mobile payments to Facebook mobile versions beginning in March.  Read more

Facebook reportedly revealed this week that more than 60 million users have engaged with third-party apps via its mobile Web site or native apps that integrate with the Bango service. With its mobile use growing, monetizing mobile is crucial for the company if it wants to continue driving overall revenue growth, and a new agreement with Bango for payment services could be one way the company is looking to do so.  Read more

Bango, a U.K. mobile payments services company, announced Wednesday that it has signed an agreement with Facebook, launching a spate of rumors that Facebook's 425 million mobile app users will soon see ads. Bango's announcement came in the form of a two-paragraph release, which says it's "too early in the relationship to accurately forecast the level of business which it may generate.”  Read more

Have you seen Google in the news?  Do you use Google's services to get your news?  As Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land reports, a lot of people use Google across multiple verticals.

The Internet is abuzz with the word that you might soon be able to buy a new Kindle at an actual Amazon (AMZN) Store. The e-commerce giant is reportedly opening its first pilot store in Seattle, something of a boutique operation that will feature Amazon exclusives like the Kindle e-reader, Kindle Fire tablet and its proprietary e-books. So why might Amazon -- which has become the nation's biggest online merchant, in part, by avoiding the overhead costs of operating stores and deftly skirting state sales tax laws to offer shoppers super-low prices -- start flirting with bricks-and-mortar retailing?  Read more

There’s been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together.  Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook—or FB as the proposed ticker symbol suggests.  Read more

There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests.  Read more

Facebook is still learning how to make money off of all it knows about you. And it will probably be learning for years, just as Google has evolved over time.  Read more

Facebook officially filed for their IPO last week with an expected offering to take place in May. At that time, Facebook will be valued somewhere between $75 billion to $100 billion. Also announced were the company's 2011 financials, showing $3.7 billion in revenue. As strong as this figure looks at first, investors should look further into key data to see how Facebook generates so much of their revenue.  Read more

With a projected valuation of as much as $100 billion, Facebook’s imminent IPO may portend great things for social media. But many planners feel less bullish about its prospects for delivering investment returns.  Read more

Mark Zuckerberg and crew may have just dialed-in some hefty numbers associated with Facebook's past-Wednesday IPO.  According to the numbers, things are going swimmingly for the social media giant.  However, as sources tell the New York Times, "We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven."

The culmination of the football season is knocking at this weekend's door.  Who's going to win the big game!?  My personal excitement is feigned; I share sentiments with another 'Googler.'  However, I do hope your consumers view your brand as a 'giant' in its industry and a 'patriot' regarding customer service and meeting mission statements.

Facebook officially filed its IPO on Wednesday. The initial public offering is expected sometime in May and will value Facebook at $75 billion to $100 billion. The company generated $3.7 billion in 2011 revenue. As strong as this figure sounds at first, a savvy investor should look further in to its financials to see how Facebook generates so much revenue. It is reported that the social media titan generated 85 percent of overall revenue from advertising.  Read more

I don't need to be jostled from sleep by Sonny and Cher; judging by the "Phil Murray" and "Punxsutawney Phil" Twitter trends, it's February second.  How many more days of winter?  I live in LA; don't hate; there's plenty of sunshine, yes, but smog, ebb-less traffic, and unrelenting crowds of people live here too.  I'm not worried about the fate of winter; but, being in online marketing, I am interested in link building processes.  If you operate a business, tips on link building should have you 'walking on sunshine,' because it's no secret of success – link building improves authority, rankings, and exposure.

Congress is considering making an important change to a law that hasn’t been touched since the heyday of VHS tapes. It’s all about privacy. You can share most anything on Facebook, but not your Netflix queue. “They want to have the ability to make that rental history more public, have it become something that is a lot more social.”  Read more

Do you have something to add to the conversation, or just calling attention?  I would address high school students in this manner who were temporarily 'off task' during class.  High school students are socially savvy; most got the point and understood the difference elucidated by my question; were they serving the good of the community or engaging in personal endeavors at the moment?

Some aspects of marketing seem intuitive, yet after time passes, the reality of data collection sets in. Such is the apparent case regarding the donations-through-text process. An online post revisits the altruistic sentiments relayed by those who donated to Haiti after the destructive earthquake of two years ago.  Read more

Twitter announced changes in its privacy policies, which immediately raised concerns for freedom activists in addition to writers and reporters in other lands, who feel their ability to share stories, some that may be seen as ‘controversial’ by respective governments and authority figures, will be limited. The reaction comes at a sensitive time for most who want to maintain online freedoms, only a week after the wake of the recent SOPA/PIPA debacles.  Read more

I read an entertaining article this morning regarding public relations work.  A PR professional listed thirteen ominous mentions, which sound cacophonic bells and whistles off within a service provider's head.  Is your business currently receiving public relations services or working with an in-house professional?  Are you resounding some of the same sentiments mentioned in the article?  Is your campaign a bleak, dramatic picture of what it's supposed to be, leaving participants in a state of mystery?  Let's explore some things mentioned in the article and better your understanding of what is and isn't under a PR pros control.

Remember Bo Jackson?  I sure do; I ripped through his Bo Knows biography with the fervor of a twelve-year-old kid, mesmerized by a titan of a multi-dimensional athlete.  Along with popular trends of the day, such as French-rolled jeans and Umbro shorts, I was into the 'Bo knows' commercials and campaign.

Could you believe a student tried pulling that on me once!?  As if a little wit would tickle my funny bone, excusing him of his in-class trespasses.  I'm a sucker for wit; it did; I let him go.

WebiMax founder and CEO Ken Wisnefski announced the company now offers an extensive SEO Reseller Strategic Partnership Program. Headed by Stan Evans, this program gives other agencies the ability to offer a full suite of SEO services to their clients, while earning residual revenue.  Read more

I enjoy reading, writing, and increasing knowledge on a number of SEO and online marketing topics, but I especially enjoy the topics of branding and reputation management.  I would say the former relates to creating associations to your brand (and its elements: Web pages, executives, products, etc) while the latter focuses on your business' 'personality,' personifying a reputable "professional."  I think branding and rep management are highly important regarding consumer relations.