Author: smartguys

Looking to launch your first blog but don’t know where to start? Blogging is a great way to build a lasting web presence while generating more traffic, and subsequently more sales. But it’s also somewhat confusing, especially for newcomers. If you’re still trying to get your first blog up and running, check out our guide […]

Are you one of the millions of small business owners who does not own a website? If so, you aren’t alone. According to a 2012 Small Business Sentiment Survey conducted by Yodle, nearly 1 in 2 (52%) small businesses in the U.S. don’t have a website. “Many small business owners are still not adopting modern […]

Google has released yet another update to its algorithm used to rank websites. Known as Panda 4.1, it follows in the same footsteps as previous Panda updates – with a focus on identifying and penalizing websites with thin, irrelevant, low-quality, and/or mostly duplicate content. If a website is deemed to offer little-to-no value to the […]

The e-commerce industry continues to grow larger and more encompassing with each passing year. In 2013, online business-to-consumer sales in the U.S. topped $322 billion, up from $289 billion the year prior – and that’s only factoring sales made in the U.S. A report published by eMarketer suggests that global e-commerce sales could reach $1.5 […]

Amazon, Inc., the world’s largest online retailer, scooped up the .Buy domain extension at auction, outbidding the search engine giant Google. According to a press release issued by the nonprofit international domain regulator Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Amazon purchased the .Buy extension for $4.6 million last Wednesday. Google and a handful […]

It’s official: Authorship is no longer supported in Google’s search results, meaning (among other things) that you’ll no longer see head shots of your favorite bloggers and writers displayed in the SERPS. John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, issued the following statement in regards to the Google Authorship program on his Google+ page. “I’ve been […]

There’s a major shakeup coming to Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) marketing platform. Starting in September, all Adwords accounts will use close variant matching for all phrase and exact match keywords. Google made the announcement on its Adwords blog earlier this month, citing the fact that approximately 7% of all Google searches contain misspellings. By including misspellings […]

While Google has yet to reveal the exact formula it uses to rank websites (and it probably won’t), it recently revealed a new factor or “signal” used in its ranking algorithm. According to a blog post published by the Mountain View company, websites that use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 2048-bit key certificate encryption will receive […]

Products Listing Ads (PLA) is a Google-owned pay-per-click advertising (PPC) platform in which advertisers pay for each click/visit to their product ads. It differs from the Mountain View company’s traditional Adwords platform in a few different ways, one of which is the content in the ad. Unlike Adwords, PLA ads contain images but do not […]

One of the hurdles faced by startups and small businesses is a lack of funds to promote their products and services. Marketing isn’t cheap by any means, and new businesses are often placed at a disadvantage because of their inability to allocate large sums of money for advertising. Thankfully, there are cost-effective forms of marketing […]