It doesn’t take an online marketing company with a decades' worth of experience to see that the relationship that SEO service providers have with Google is a complicated one. Of course much of this is owed to the recent string of Penguin and Panda algorithm updates (of which we discuss quite often), but there are also several other key aspects of the world's biggest search engine company that makes our jobs equally challenging and exciting. Take for example the constant addition and removal of network features for Google's numerous services.

It's a problem I've seen time and time again from business owners that are new to search engine optimization. After a few months of striking out on their own and using popular SEO methods to increase their visibility on Google SERPs, they end up giving up seemingly out of the blue. They've gone through their company site and improved the presence of keywords, updated meta tags, set up their social media listings, and even run a fairly robust PPC campaign. Yet, despite their best efforts, they still aren't seeing the conversions they want.

It's an error in judgment that is often made by many business owners over the course of their careers. All too often a person is quick to dismiss a lack of results from a new initiative as being representative of a no-win battle. Before new strategies can be proven one way or the other, these operations end up being dropped in favor of tried-and-true tactics that yield consistent but altogether few results. Although there is certainly something to be said for cutting losses before they go spiraling out of control, most people poorly assess the potential strength of their advertising and miss out on the rewards they could reap with the right approach.

Although much of the organic web traffic funneling that SEO companies do is through backlinks in articles and partner sites, the majority of your website visitors end up seeing the landing page before anything else. Even when using search phrases that incorporate long tail keywords or other specified terms, Google and Bing both tend to serve up the front page of a company's site rather than subdirectories or blogs. Because of this, online marketing consultants always instruct their clients to create a welcome entrance to their website for would-be customers.

By now, business owners have learned a thing or two about what a SEO company can achieve.  However, the services needed to further a company's online presence and drive conversion rates differ from entity to entity.   While each situation differs, there are a still several elements found in any successful SEO campaign that will always have a positive impact.

Some of you may have been following the ongoing debacle regarding journalist Guy Adams (of The Independent), NBC, the London Olympics and Twitter. For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the latest news, the story basically boils down to a series of events that ultimately ended with a well-known and outspoken journalist being banned from Twitter due to requests from NBC.

It's impossible to read the latest news in our industry without noticing the tone of immediate concern that so many others have. Ever since the more recent Panda updates started taking a significant toll on SERPs linked with popular trending keywords, everyone has been pointing at Google and blaming the company for the increasingly poor performance of their websites. Add to this the shakeup with Penguin and company's ongoing silence regarding its algorithm and it's easy to see why so many well-known voices in the SEO community are up in arms.

If you're a website owner who's noticed your site's standings in the Google SERPs have dropped in the last 48 hours, then you'll likely already know who (or what) is to blame for it. Back on Tuesday, Google ran a data refresh for Panda which, according to the company's predictions, affected around 1% of its total index pages. In the time since the update, several notable SEO news networks have reported on the issue and begun asking the community about the extent of the damage.

Saying that the internet is a big place is among the greatest understatements anyone can make. In our modern web-centric age, everyone is connected to each other and industries appear to grow overnight. Regardless of the service or product a business may offer, there's always going to be a number of other organizations out there getting in a company's way. When Google or Bing searches for an industry term bring back page after page of results of competitors, it's clearly time to begin reexamining your online marketing strategy.

Despite any snide comments that Google's critics may have as of late, it's clear that the company's role in the search engine market remains unchallenged. With the Google glasses project only a few months away from going public (at least in a beta state) and the company's cloud-based storage system now available for all users, the world's most popular search engine company has managed to keep its momentum in light of any past missteps. At this point, the only remotely serious competition that the company faces is through Microsoft and its Bing search engine.

Google's ongoing efforts to push its social network's exposure simply cannot be ignored. After having updated its Google+ Android app last month, the networks' mobile users were treated to flashy new animations and larger displays for profile images. At that time, Google also announced that an update for the iOS version of Google+ was already in the works and would arrive with some additional functionality.

It's a mistake that both SEO firms and users see time and time again. As more small business owners decide to market their company properties through social media, they end up blundering through the process with little results to show for their efforts. So the best and brightest minds of the faltering business scratch their collective heads. What are we doing wrong? Why aren't people following us? Why aren't they sharing our posts?

Just yesterday, Google made a pretty significant announcement of which every business owner should take note. In an attempt to further combine its social media efforts with its focus on independently-owned companies, Google has integrated its Google Places program into Google+ Local. While the benefits of this consolidation many not be immediately apparent to everyone, the potential this move has for small business owners is considerable to say the least.

For the last twenty years, numerous SEO companies and internet advertisers have depended on keywords as being a guiding light for search engine indexers and site crawlers. A tactic commonly used by ethical and unethical online marketing agencies alike, heavily emphasized keyword implementation was so pervasive throughout the web development community that almost everyone has come to rely on it. Of course, this all started to change with the arrival of Google's Panda updates as well as the recent release of Penguin. Now, webmasters are looking for ways to remain relevant to Google and other search engines while revising their own operations.

The last two weeks have been an incredibly stressful time for every web-focused company. Between Facebook's recent woes concerning its IPO and General Motors pulling out of its in-network marketing, there's been more than a little bit of uncertainty in the SEO and online marketing communities as of late. Many of our readers no doubt have their own growing concerns over the state of all-things social media and search engine-related. While current events may have everyone second guessing the viability of their social network strategies, in truth there is no reason to panic.

Although the term may sound like made-up internet jargon (and to some extent it is), "gamification" is a real trend and one that has become increasingly common in society. The phrase itself refers to the rising prevalence of game-like mechanics across non-game-related media in our daily lives. Regular users of mobile apps such as Foursquare are no doubt familiar with the concept: ordinary errands and chores help a person earn points and badges with which to compete with friends and, sometimes, random strangers. Occasionally there are prizes (often in the form of coupons), but most of the time that users spend on Foursquare is geared towards friendly competition.

Tomorrow marks one month since the debut of Google's Penguin, and everyone is still trying to make sense of the update. While a couple websites have come into existence as a response to Google's most recent revisions to its algorithm, little has been made in the way of progress when it comes to actually puzzling out how Penguin works. Although it is highly unlikely that the company will ever reveal the mechanisms behind the update, the SEO community has at least come up with a few useful tips for creating content that Google's search engine wants.

A few days ago, Google unveiled its newest search feature, Knowledge Graph, to network users. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the announced program, Knowledge Graph is being launched as a sidebar addition to the company's search engine results. While the company's SERPs will stay the way they've always been, the new feature will serve up interesting facts, details and relevant information for popular keywords entered in queries. Google has stated that it has plans to bring the function to mobile platforms in the future as well.

Although social media users swap countless IMs and posts across PCs and laptops every month, most people fail to realize the amount of direct messaging that takes place between mobile device owners through those same social networks. According to a blog published just a few days ago on the New York Times website, a number of recent studies all point to the conclusion that social media apps are quickly replacing standard phone SMS as a primary form of mobile communication. One particular report states that the amount of text messages relayed by cellphone owners in the Phillipines on a monthly basis has decreased by more than a third from 2010 to 2011 (down to 400 texts from around 660).

Among all the various search engines for which SEOs develop, it's Google that time and time again gets the most attention from online marketing firms. Between continual updates to its search algorithm and ongoing releases for new user apps, the world's biggest search engine company has truly become a force to be reckoned with. While competitors may try to get the edge on the company, Google's current market share puts it well ahead of the pack.

Many of us in the internet advertising industry have been praising up and down the supposedly limitless potential of Pinterest for months now. As an up-and-coming social network with millions of followers on Facebook alone, the social media site has come up in many discussions since it went into its beta phase. Yet, while it has quickly become a popular talking point for social marketing conjecture, Pinterest is still a relatively unknown website for many business owners.

Like a prediction straight out of a 80s sci-fi movie, everyone from teenagers to adults is constantly connected to one another these days via mobile phones. Over the course of the last six years, the prevalence and speed by which Blackberries, tablet PCs and smartphones have spread have become increasingly pronounced. As I discussed several days ago, the mobile market is one that everyone is trying to tap into at the moment. Yet at the same time, there are far more ways to become noticeable to mobile users than simply being SEO-friendly and active on social media.

As my fellow writers and I have recommended time and time ago, it's a good practice for companies to use social media to supplement their other organic SEO activity. Due to the ever-increasing number of users found on networks such as Facebook and Twitter, many start-up or entrepreneur company owners are sharing their own original content effortlessly with the masses. Businesses that remain active with social media sites consistently see better traffic to their online properties than those companies that don't retweet or post status updates. It's an exciting time for small and medium-sized businesses to be sure, but many companies are finding that their success is somewhat limited and they don't know why.
 

Everyone who writes about SEO has recognized Google's Penguin update as the hot button issue at the moment. After a staggering 350,000 sites were affected by the company's recent algorithm revisions, the SEO community fell into a bit of disarray over the topic. Across the board, reaction to the update has been mostly negative as only a few actually notable spam and aggregator websites were impacted by Penguin while thousands of respectable businesses were hit as well. It's a subject that is generating a lot of buzz and has led to sites devoted to the subject and commentary from our own Jill Johnson.
 

In the world of online marketing, there's a particular crowd of internet users that have provided advertisers with quite the dilemma for years. While office-bound white collar workers and Generation Z teens are exceptionally active when it comes to interacting with web-based ads, it's been the mobile user market that has eluded many marketing firms for so long. According to a recent Pew Research study, an increasing number of people are interacting with news and media via a combination of mobile devices and home PCs or laptops. Despite this rising trend, the number of users that interact with ads on their smartphone or tablet PCs is still relatively low.

Despite the immense popularity of social networks, often times many companies find that their social media listings only get visited by a handful of people on a regular basis. Every SEO company these days strongly recommends that its clients actively participate in media sharing on networks such as Facebook or Google+, but these agencies usually end up only getting mixed results themselves when performing social media campaigns. While one could try to chalk up this whole situation as being a consequence of market saturation, the fact remains that most faltering social media listings are a result of low audience capture.

When business owners hear the term "online marketing," many people immediately think of the more overt advertising that they see when surfing the web. Banner ads, PPC links on search results and pop-up ads are certainly all very common tools used by internet marketers. Yet many companies have been relying on more SEO-oriented techniques to get their brand's name recognized by internet users. This change of pace isn't due to lackluster results from PPC, but rather a repurposed focus on trying to elevate organic search results over paid efforts.

Website management can be an incredibly tricky business for any webmaster or site owner. Although creating a site from scratch can be difficult enough, it's getting web traffic and conversion rates that ultimately becomes the greatest challenge for so many of us in the industry. Startup company and small business owners in particular tend to lack the tools and knowledge necessary to turn a failing website into something which a person can be proud of. The whole dilemma can be a bit disheartening to those company owners who just want to be able to get their businesses up and running instead of having to fiddle with page attributes and social media campaigns.

In yesterday's blog post, I spoke at length about the necessity of high quality image and video assets in a company's marketing efforts. With visual media becoming an increasingly useful tool in every internet advertising campaign, the race is on to secure photos and digital camera footage that users will find engaging. Whereas in my previous blog entry I gave advice to small business owners on how to procure this media, today I will be giving guidelines on how and where to implement these excellent strategic marketing assets.

The old adage of "a picture's worth a thousand words" is an all-encompassing one in today's 21^st century society. As the internet has become the primary form of communication for millions of people the world over, businesses often emphasize the importance of their media assets. While print magazines and newspapers struggle to maintain their relevance with a digitally-focused generation of media consumers, online organizations and companies are able to capture the attention of countless users effortlessly using only a handful of eye-catching photos or entertaining video clips.