Online businesses are realizing in 2013 that social media is the message, which is creating a major shift in marketing towards social media engagement. Businesses are learning that building an online community through social media is the key to nurturing and converting sales leads. Social media is not a place for direct sales and is more suited for developing leads than sending traffic to your online hubs for landing pages.

Content Marketing Google+ is attracting a significant following now that the "+1" button...

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Online advertisers who use Google's AdWords platform can now get a better idea how well their campaigns are working as Google fine tunes its reporting. Quality Score is a rating of keywords on a scale of 1-10. Google has just updated how this score relates to expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. The purpose of the update is to help advertisers evaluate and improve their ads based on visibility and expected performance. Google has not changed how Quality Score is calculated for keywords, so the new...

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Google Authorship is a set of tools designed to connect web content with the Google+ profile of the content creator. Authorship can help your search rankings, as it assigns "Author Ranking" to your content. One of the advantages of setting up Authorship is that it indexes writers in Google's search engine and matches them with their articles and blogs. Authorship is still in its infancy and now there are concerns about how it affects search and traffic results.

A web owner named Alex Yumashev of Jitbit.com using Authorship noticed...

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Microsoft has made a significant change of course regarding Windows devices and user access to Flash content. Going forward, Microsoft mobile devices, tablets, and desktop browsers will allow Flash to run unless the content being requested is on a Microsoft-created blacklist of prohibited websites. Previously, users had been experiencing potential problems with Flash or even a complete inability to view certain Flash sites. Upon the rollout of Windows 8, people using IE10 on desktop computers could use Flash but experienced sporadic and...

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Google Plus can be an effective tool for building your business…with 10 caveats. Here are ten things that you should avoid while using Google Plus: Using a Low Quality Profile Picture Unclear profile pictures deter users from connecting with you, especially if the picture is a brand name. Use large, high quality pictures. Images of yourself in professional business attire will generate more leads than a picture of you in a tee shirt. An Incomplete Profile An incomplete profile tells visitors that you will sacrifice sales...

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As of late, the debate about whether or not using guest blogging is an ethical method of backlinking to your website has heated up. The short answer is yes, if you do it correctly. Guest blogging is when you publish an article on another person’s website. Many people use this tactic to link back to their websites, just as they did years ago, when they outsourced the compiling of hundreds of short blogs...

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There has been a push as of late to simplify web design for the lay viewer in order to make the page less cluttered, more exciting and more interactive. Here are some trends that tech companies should keep an eye on: Data Integration Designers are now integrating interactive data visualizations directly into the HTML coding instead of uploading relevant data information to a coded site for display. In...

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More than 91 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing and CMOs plan to increase their spending on content marketing budgets this year, making it an important tool to attract leads and convert leads to clients.

Marketers use content and will increase content because, quite simply, it works. More than 87 percent of respondents to a recent CMO Council and NetLine survey reported that content drove decisions about what companies to work with.

Making content a...

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In terms of advertising, mobile marketing is the new Facebook. It is on the front lines of an advertising revolution supported by our need to digitize the world. That said, it’s important to have a strong mobile marketing campaign in place. Here are six steps that will help your campaign turn a profit.

Call Tracking from Google Mobile Paid Search Insert clickable and trackable contact numbers in your Google

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According to an assessment performed by Pure Oxygen Labs, only 56% of Fortune 100 companies are providing any kind of mobile content designed for smartphone users. This minimalist attitude toward optimizing content for mobile experiences could potentially take a large chunk out of these companies' rankings when it comes to where Google places them on search results, due to changes in Google's mobile algorithms.

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