Technology enhancements have led businesses to be able to add extraordinary new features to their marketing campaigns such as new advertising channels and tracking accuracy and consumer data. As it becomes easier to find new ways to put your brand in front of large numbers of people at once, those same people become bombarded with unwanted messaging from businesses. Technology allows us all to move at a faster and faster pace, making consumers less patient to interruptions than ever before. Businesses must find an alternative way to raise awareness of their brand without forcing their messaging on consumers. Consumers must be introduced to...

If you use Google Calendar to send or receive calendar invitations, you may hear feedback from others that your Google calendar appears to change to an incorrect time when you send a calendar invitation. Or, you may regularly receive Google Calendar invites that display in your email as a different time than what you know the invitation is supposed to say. If Google Calendar is changing your Calendar times incorrectly, it may be a time zone setting issue. Here is how to troubleshoot and fix Google calendar time errors: Time Zone Support Settings Google Calendar allows you to tell it what time zone you are in. Once you say, “I am in...

It is nearly impossible to keep up with the vast amount of changes and recommendations that Google puts out on how to best optimize to gain rankings and resulting organic search traffic. Google’s Matt Cutts put out an informative SEO updates video today talking about what to expect in the next few months. Here is an interpretation that strips off the SEO lingo and focuses on where to pay attention: Content That Users Love Cutts relayed the same message that needs to be your underlying principle for all on-site SEO efforts: make good-quality, compelling content for your visitors, and Google will send them your way! He states that you...

How your images are sized and coded has an impact on your website’s technical SEO. If not done correctly, images will slow your website’s load time, detracting from the user experience and making Google mad! Take a few basic steps to check out and correct how your images are coded and pulled in to a website visitor’s browser. Image Sizing Resize images to the size that they should be displayed on the website. Avoid resizing images with CSS or with HTML on page. If a browser is told to display an image at a certain size, it still has to load the full size image called out in the HTML, then displays the size it is told to...

A popular post on Facebook that you interact with can quickly fill your email inbox with undesired notifications. You already get Facebook notifications on your iphone or Android, so why in the world does Facebook think that you need them clogging up your email inbox too? There are several different ways that Facebook allows you to manage the number of notifications you receive from Facebook, and how. You are a popular person, which means that as soon as you start posting on Facebook, “likes,” comments and shares are clogging up your email inbox, so lets turn them off in Facebook’s account settings. Go to Facebook...

Although not very intuitive, it is possible within the Facebook smartphone and tablet app to “unfollow” a Facebook post. After interacting with a post on Facebook by commenting, sharing, or hitting the like button, Facebook will automatically keep you informed of any further activity on that post via email notification or your mobile app push notifications unless you manually unsubscribe from further updates on the post. When on your mobile device, that becomes more difficult to do. If you comment on a popular post that generates a lot of activity, you may end up getting flooded with notifications about a post that you never...

Part of optimized website design is how your site is coded right from the beginning. If developed incorrectly, it can be very expensive and time-consuming to correct and change your styling and coding to make your new website crawlable and easy to index by Google, Bing and other search engines. Although it is helpful when your developer designs with search-friendly coding, it is not required, so get your SEO involved early in the process to avoid spending even more money on your new site after it goes live just to make it visible. Read on for tips on how to code for SEO. Keep Important Content Out of JavaScript Keywords must all be visible...

XML Sitemap Explains your website to search engines. It is the search engine language equivalent to giving a tourist a map of a city. The better search engines can understand your website structure, the better they will index it. WordPress CMS plugin – Google Sitemap Generator XML sitemaps need to auto-update! Making a static sitemap with no future updating is self-defeating, because it will eventually not match the website as the site is updated and the sitemap will become more confusing to search engines than helpful. Sitemaps go at this URL – www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml To learn more or get more technical, check out the...

How do you change your real name on your Google account? I recently discovered that this is not as intuitive or easy as you may think! Since it took me a while to figure it out, I figured it may be helpful to share how to change your real name that is tied to your Google account. Sign in to your Google account. Go to the Google account settings page: https://www.google.com/settings/account Click “Edit” next to the “Email” heading: Enter your first and last name as you would like them to appear associated with your Google account and click save. Done! Keep in mind that the name you choose will also be the name...

SEO (search engine optimization) today is not increasingly complicated by definition. In fact, “SEO” has really become more of a small, phase I step as part of an overall integrated marketing strategy. SEO is the basics of setting up your website to properly communicate with major search engines, mainly Google through fast load times, smart user-friendly layout (no ad-bombarding headers, please!), and proper coding techniques used to identify and describe your site. “SEO” has really become more of a small, phase I step as part of an overall integrated marketing strategy. Once the basics are covered, you have moved...

Google Drive appears to be Google’s ominous response to Dropbox, the popular cloud storage and file sharing tool. Personally, I do not know what I did to stay organized before Dropbox. It carries all files that I need, which I can now get on my iPhone, iPad, MAC, PC, or remotely by logging in to www.dropbox.com from any computer with an internet connection. I can also share files and folders with collaborators who also have Dropbox accounts quickly and easily through Dropbox’s easy-to-use sharing setup. Suddenly, I am organized, my important files are available everywhere (and synonymously backedup all the time!), and all is...

The High Stakes World of Mobile Payments Mobile payment systems handled $240 billion of transactions in 2011. You can transfer money, buy movie tickets, airfare, book hotels, and pay for your $2 breakfast burrito from the local street vendor on your 4-inch smartphone. The infographic below (source: www.mobilepaymentstoday.com) provides an excellent summary representation of the mobile payment systems available and the companies supporting them. Mobile payments bring large corporations such as Intuit in to competition with small start-ups such as Square. I used Square when running a lawn care business. After cutting a lawn, we could knock...

WordPress website framework is employed by over 14% of the top million sites on the web. WordPress has become the world’s largest content management system (CMS), and for good reason! WordPress is widely known as the best CMS for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) worldwide. With stats showing in any given industry that over 70% of consumers automatically go to Google to start shopping for any product or service, an SEO-friendly CMS is an absolute must. WordPress is also user-friendly, allowing an employee with minimal training to edit, update, and even add new pages or posts to the company’s website. With Google’s...

The “more is better” motto with link building may still stand as an overarching idea to SEO, but major search engines now consider many more factors aside from quantity of links when considering your backlink validity. Backlinks are said to make up more than 30% of what determines where you stand in search engine ranking algorithms, making them a huge consideration to your overall SEO strategy. Quantity Ok, numbers aren’t everything, BUT your number of backlinks overall does still count! Do not take this to mean it’s time to go on a link spamming spree, nor hire someone else to do so. How many is enough? There is no...