As Google continues to enhance their search results for a better user experience, webmasters, business owners, and the like have been scrambling to keep up with the changes.  Back in 2009 Google introduced rich snippets on their Google Webmaster Blog, which to many was just a buzzword that made little sense and was not important enough to pursue. Today, rich snippets are an important part of the search engine result pages (SERPS) and something you do not want to ignore.

In years past, it was very simple to rank a web site high atop Google's search results without devoting the time to creating relevant, high-quality content.

Google domination could be achieved with sneaky, underhanded tactics known as "black hat" search engine optimization.

Black hat SEO methods included stuffing keywords into the text of a web site as densely as possible, paying for hundreds (or thousands) of low-quality back links to your site from link farms, subscribing to blog networks to procure more back links, and primarily using keywords as anchor text for links.

Each month there are more than one billion searches entered into the major search engines.  35% of these searches are from people looking for local merchants, so that means there are over 300 million people looking for products or services that YOU provide. Is your website being found? If not, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that you are missing out. 

Local SEO, or search engine optimization, allows you to reach potential customers in your geographical area. The majority of people searching for local businesses are ready to make a purchase.  In fact, more than 60% of local searches generate a sale. 

Pay per click (often referred to as PPC) is an effective and popular advertising strategy that is used by the major search engines, Google, Bing Paid Advertising and Yahoo. The strategy provides instant and much targeted traffic to the online business website almost immediately. In this online marketing strategy, the website owner is obligated to pay whenever someone, whether locally or in another remote part in the world, should click on his online advertising.

Keywords are essential in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and therefore to your online marketing success. Keywords are the terms that searchers enter into search engines, such as Google or Bing. A search engine will return a list of search results based on its analysis of how likely the web page, PDF or other item will meet the searchers’ needs. Searchers typically look through page one of the search results to find what they are looking for; they rarely go even to page two. By using effective keywords in your web content, you’ll increase your chances of appearing on page one of the search results. Appearing on page one increases the chances the link to your site will be clicked. This, in turn, will increase your opportunity to gain prospects and sales.