Viral blog post mini-business case study: The Search Guru dissects what makes a post or series catch on fire and spread throughout the Internet. Let’s face it. Nobody can predict, with certainty, which blog posts will become popular, much less ones that go viral, being spread from person to person via social media sharing and

Google officially changes its position on the importance of links in ranking – and Erik Baeumlisberger from The Search Guru noticed it first. On June 18th, Erik discovered a big change at Google. In the past, Google had advised webmasters that increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages could improve the

Website conversion optimization answers the big question: what do my customers want to see on my website? In a previous post, we explored the pitfalls of letting a HiPPO design your website. Too often, websites are shaped by the wants of executives / managers and not by the needs of clients / customers. Conversion optimization

So . . . how much does SEO cost, anyhow? Discover what your finance team needs to know about SEO. If your company is exploring search engine optimization, it’s important to get buy-in from the entire team. To that end, The Search Guru is publishing a series of posts on how to share the information

Influencers can affect the opinions and buying decisions of your customers. Discover what types of influencers there are and why using social networking for business is necessary to identify them. Before social media dominated consumers’ time online, with 1 out of every 7 minutes spent online on Facebook, marketers were primarily concerned with demographics such

Buying a domain name can be risky if you don’t have a plan. Here are some important things you need to know before you get a domain name. Let’s start at the beginning by answering the question what is a domain name? Even if you already have one, you might not really understand what it

Site maps, both an HTML site map and an XML site map, are essential for complete indexing of a site in the search engines. A website sitemap is a page that links to all other pages on the site in a clear, logical manner. They are helpful for visitors who are navigating the site; plus,

Google’s been up to a lot lately. In the second quarter of 2012 there were numerous Google changes, including the release of Google Penguin. Here is a timeline of some noteworthy Google changes from the past two months: April 2012: Google updates index size and tiers Fifty-two search quality changes for the month of April

Google Alert: discover numerous new ways to use the search giant’s free service to help your business and/or personal brand. Ways in which these alerts are typically used include: To receive news on topics of interest, perhaps because they’re important to your business, because you blog about cutting-edge developments in a particular field and so

Google Places for Business is now part of Google+. Optimize your Google Places listing today to take full advantage of new Google Places SEO ranking factors. Google’s recent announcement that Google Places for Business would become part of Google+ has caused some confusion. At present, the switch from Google Places for Business to Google+ Local