The term blog was first coined in the late 1990s. It became common in modern lexicon about 2004. Now, in 2013, it's still hard for some people to get. When I talk to businesses about blogging, I'm convinced that the most common reason why they don't blog it's because they don't like the word blog. They seem to think it's kind of hokey.

I think that a part of the problem is that blogging may have gotten a bad reputation over the years because the mention of a blogger typically elicits the image of someone in their parents’ basement, uploading opinionated and overly sarcastic content to the "blogosphere".

Regardless of your opinion of blogs, the truth of the matter is that blogs are a great way to upload fresh, relevant content to your website. If you really hate the term blog, you can call them whatever you want. You can call them news stories, articles or just your personal rantings.

There are many important benefits associated with regular blogging. The most important advantage you have from a blog is that it allows you to offer the Internet community, and anyone who is interested in reading, tips and information related to your specific industry. There are many authorities currently chiming in on different topics these days, and blogging allows your voice to be heard among the experts. Blogging allows you to establish yourself as the credible authority.

Other benefits of blogging include:

• Relay important information to your readers - The readers of your blog may be your website visitors, new users, or people subscribed to your RSS feed. Blogging is great way to keep content on your site fresh, updated, and targeted to current events and happenings.
• Become an authority in your field - It’s a little more difficult to become a trusted authority or voice in your particular industry, but if your content is good enough, people will adhere to it. Blogging is a great way to spread your knowledge to the world.
• Reap the SEO benefit of blogging - Aside from branding yourself as a reputable source of information, regular blogging also helps in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The Google algorithm loves fresh content, so every time the Google Bot scans the interwebs for fresh information, they’ll stumble across your newly written blog.

Yes, I know, blogging can be hard. It's time consuming and can be difficult to find the time. Blogging is sometimes regarded as a chore to many webmasters or business owners as the topic needs to be relevant and the content needs to be good. Your ultimate goal for a blog is to be picked up by other sources like news media, more established blogs, or other industry pages in order to gain maximum SEO benefit and truly establish yourself as a credible source of information.

Get active on your website and post a blog today!

The Internet is certainly known for a gathering place of information. It's a challenge to sift through all the information and know exactly how to use it. As more information becomes available more opportunities are created for consumers to choose from in regard to services and useful platforms. The overabundance of companies currently operating on the Internet has led to large amount of services all vying for your business.

Offering a freemium to consumers has become a large trend ever since the Internet has found its way into virtually every home. Revenue streams may not be dictated by purchasing memberships or buying services but earned through subjecting users to advertising and other forms of media that will make a company profitable.

Although the freemium model may spell the eventual downfall of some companies unable to leverage their Internet traffic into a viable source of income, it has certainly benefited the average consumer in more ways than one.

As a web marketer today you have myriad tools at your disposal to market yourself online. Here are some of the handiest tools you can use as a web marketer to improve your online presence.

• Facebook - Okay, this is a gimme. This social networking giant has become so massive that people have forgotten that it’s a free tool for business to promote their brand, advertise specials and events, and be found on search engines. The only cost associated with creating a Facebook page for your business is time, and it really doesn’t take a lot of it to create a social media presence for your business.
• HootSuite - HootSuite is a platform that allows the integration of all of your social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and Google Plus. It’s a great way of organizing all of your information in one place but the real function that is beneficial for businesses is the ability to schedule posts. As a busy person, scheduling content is a useful advantage to have in order to make sure you’re staying active on social media.
• Mail Chimp - Do you currently dabble in the realm of email marketing? If so, then you no doubt have heard of Mail Chimp, a free service that allows you to customize lists, templates, and send out email campaigns to your list of subscribers. Easy-to-use, customizable, and free, Mail Chimp is a great choice for those starting out in the email marketing world.
• Eventbrite - Have an upcoming event and need to sell tickets online? Eventbrite offers users a free way of creating events and keeping track of attendees, all while giving you the ability to sell tickets online. Eventbrite has truly changed the landscape for many businesses and continues to improve on its services.

There are countless other services you can leverage in your company and most have the option to pay for a membership in exchange for expanded services. Even at my company, we will often use the free version f the service as many times, it's more than enough to be successful in your efforts.

Pinterest has quickly grown to be one of the top five social networks. Still, most business owners are hesitant about joining yet another social network. They are still struggling to work with and understand the two best known social networks: Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest is great tool for businesses who sell products directly to consumers. That is especially true if your product looks cool. This is because Pinterest is really the only social network entirely based on imagery posted from other locations. Instagram is an imagery based social network but those are primarily for original imagery taken with your own camera. In addition, because each image has a description, you can do some great searches as well.

Here are some interesting facts you might consider with Pinterest for your business:

• Price point pins get 36% more likes than those without price points.
• 69% of people who use Pinterest have bought at least one item or wanted to purchase from pins they've viewed.
• The demographic of users on Pinterest are 80% women and 20% men, as women tend to make more purchase decisions.
• The average daily user on Pinterest spends 1 hour and 17 minutes on the social network.

The concept for Pinterest started with the original social bookmarking concept but has grown in popularity, primarily because of the use of imagery. Using Pinterest as a social bookmarking site can help boost your website in traffic as well as search engine rankings if done properly.

As you consider getting started in Pinterest for your business, you might need a little help in managing your presence. Here are three tools that might help you get started in your business pinning.

• Piqora- use analytics to track ROI and scheudle pins automatically
• Pinstamatic – add some excitement and fun to your boards
• Hello Society – adds the ability to calculate your influence and additional analytics.

As Pinterest is still new, some of the tools are still learning how to be effective and actually make money. We'll likely see tools come and go until Pinterest becomes a little more mature.

Time for you to set up your pin board and get started!

Google has long been the primary search engine on the internet, bringing in over 65% on average of search engine queries. The term Google has become so ubiquitous that google is the verb for searching on the web. Bing tried to make the same move but it will likely never happen even though they are in second place in the search engine market share; they are a very distant second at about 16% search share.

Because Google is the primary source for the majority of the searchers, our company focuses on adhering to what Google wants. The other search engines end up coming along at the same time. It is vital that your business keeps up with the latest updates from Google to ensure that your website remains in compliance with Google’s guidelines.

The biggest challenge is that the guidelines change on a regular basis. What was acceptable two years ago or even one year ago is no longer so.

Earlier this year Google released an update to their search algorithm with the Penguin 2.0 update. This updated changed the way that Google ranks results, which can have a direct effect on where your website appears through their search results.

Sometimes the changes included in the update are designed to kill the spamming that takes place in search engines... you know, from the unsavory folk that try to game the system. Usually, however, the updates are put in place to help provide more relevant search results to its users. Google does this by implementing changes that they feel will target those utilizing what are known as “black hat” SEO tactics. These include:

• Keyword Stuffing
• Hidden Text on Page
• Doorway Pages
• Duplicate Content
• Interlinking of Sites
• Link Farms

These are just a few of the tactics that may end up getting your website de-indexed by Google. You may not completely understand these terms and, perhaps, in a future post I'll take some time to discuss in greater detail. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you will want to take time to understand these basic no-no tactics.

It is vital that you are staying up on the latest changes from Google so that you ensure you aren’t doing anything that could negatively affect your ranking in search results. Google puts out multiple small updates each year, and will usually have 1-2 large updates each year that has quite an impact on search rankings.

One of the best ways to ensure that you are staying in line with Google’s is to focus on creating unique and engaging content on your website and avoid tactics such as purchasing links or stuffing keywords on your page or in your code. Google will never punish a website for creating engaging content that is unique to their site, as the goal of Google is to provide this type of relevant result to their users.

You may have heard the terms SEO and SEM bandied about over the last few years. I am reasonably confident that at least half of the so-called professionals that are in the search industry don't really know what they are talking about. They tend to use these two terms interchangeably.

In fact, you can especially identify someone that doesn't understand the distinction of these two terms when they say things like:

• Sign up for SEO and get more traffic.
• Let us do SEO for you and you'll sell more stuff.
• Guaranteed top of Google in X months.

There is a clear distinction between these two terms and, if you are going to hire someone to help you, you must know that distinction. In fact, if you are going to do it yourself, you should understand the difference. It is safe to say that all SEO is SEM but not all SEM is SEO.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of getting key terms for your web presence to the top of the natural (not paid) results in the search engines. Usually, we use the term in conjunction with Google searches but it applies to any search engine. SEO is a big job; there are more than 75 factors that go into just ranking your local page in Google alone.

There are many key tactics that go into getting higher in the search engines. It can be broken down into three key categories:

• Code: The way your website is built on the back end. How the title is written or the organization of the page content in the coding section.
• Content: The more content people can read, the greater your likelihood of getting higher in the search engines.
• Links: Inbound links act as a vote to the authority of your website. The more links, the better.

Just remember, SEO has to do with the natural listings. When you see the paid placements in search results that is not SEO.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing

The purpose of SEM is to gain overall improved visibility in the search engines whether it be through paid or non-paid locations. That could mean using SEO to get to the top of the natural listings or pay for an ad on the search engine results page (SERP).

All the major search engines provide you with the ability to buy a key word as an advertisement. When you conduct a search, the search engines will return to you a list of all those that are paid first then those that naturally appear at the top of the search engines through SEO.

Any listing on the SERP is through SEM but only the organic or natural listings are from SEO (or they just got lucky).

What This Really Means

So what’s the takeaway? SEO is unpaid and solely uses information in the categories of code, content, and links. SEM, on the other hand, takes both SEO and paid search results into account.

SEO does not directly generate traffic but will when you get enough of the right terms to the top of the search engines. SEM, when done right, can generate lots of traffic starting day one.

When you get traffic from your SEM, don't expect an immediate influx of sales. Just because they come, it doesn't mean they will buy. If your website does what it's supposed to and you've performed your SEM properly, you greatly increase your odds of great performance.

I'm surprised how often I still get friend requests on Facebook from businesses. It's been a couple of years since I wrote my post on "Facebook No-Nos." It's time to revisit.

Choosing the correct type of Facebook page for your business is extremely important. If use a personal account for your business page, not only will you not be able to manage your business information properly but you will miss out on many features that can allow you to better promote your business offerings.

In addition to the ability to promote your business, you'll be able to some great analytics about how your page is performing. People can fan your page without being friends. You can even promote posts that are doing well so they can do that much better.

While I won't discuss exactly how to do this in this post, if you choose to do it yourself, you'll want to make sure that you categorize your business correctly and setup the page properly. This link might help you in your quest to getting your business page set up.

There are six key categories for setting up your page. Unfortunately Facebook doesn't give any clear guidelines on the definition of each of the pages so I've included how I think they should be considered.

• Local Business or Place - If you have a small store or a location for a chain you can be a local business or place. Make sure you actually have a location to use this. Assume people will visit you at this location.
• Company, Organization or Institution – You might consider this as a b2b company, a professional group (networking group, association) or an educational institution. Even a non-profit, which you've chosen to not have a local business page, would fit here.
• Brand or Product - If you are an author, this could be your book. As a company, this is your specific product... assuming that people care about it. If you sell Amazing Toothbrushes, this would be the brand page for Amazing Toothbrushes.
• Artist, Band or Public Figure - You could be a politician, musician or an author.
• Entertainment - Consider this for an entertainment venue that doesn't fit well with local business or place. This could also be used for a big event that seems more than just an event page.
• Cause or Commnity - This wouldn't be for a non-profit but for the cause a non-profit supports. It could be a local movement or something many people are working for but you might not have an official organization backing it.

As you take the time to set up your page properly, you'll find your options for marketing your business will open up quite a bit.

Now, if you have already done a no-no and created your business page as a personal profile, it's time to fix it. Fortunately, Facebook has a great tool and pretty good information on how to do this. You can click here to learn all you need to learn.

Setting up a business page is not difficult but is necessary to truly allow your business to succeed on Facebook. Taking the time to properly set up your Facebook fan page not only legitimizes your presence on social media, but it also helps to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find you!

When you first get your new website, it's a momentous occasion. You'll usually expect bells and whistles mixed with a few fireworks by way of celebration. In fact, as you might expect, the entire world joins in one common thought of how wonderful you are and how fortunate you are to have accomplished a feat such as telling your server guys to flip the switch.

But, after the honeymoon of a new website launch wears thin... and even before you launch the website, there are a few things you need to be sure to take care of. One of the most important is checking for broken links.

Broken link checking can be a thorn in the side of many a web developer. You can think you have everything working but a change in one place can cause links to be broken in another. If you link to an external website and that sites has a change, your links will be broken.

As a result, before you go live and periodically after you go live, you'll want to check for broken links on your website.

Of course, you can just click through all the links on your website. If you have a small website, that may be a very reasonable activity. However, if you are active in blogging or have a lot of other content, that can become tiresome very quickly.

To ensure that your site is free of these broken links, use a tool that makes it easy. You can do a Google search and find a number of online resources but if you have a good content management system, you'll likely have logs of pages that people have tried to go to by are pages not found. Even Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource.

When you find a broken link, and you will, make sure to get it fixed right away.

One more thing to consider. One of the most common things to forget when building a website is how to handle it when there is a broken link or someone types in a wrong URL on your site and ends up at a page not found. Those are called 404 errors. These pages should be instructive and help your clients know what to do.

On my site, I have had a little fun with it. In fact, you can click on this link right here and see how I've done it. Just so you know, this link is intended to be broken. It doesn't work. Please don't email me and tell me that I have a broken link because I know it's broken. It's for demonstration purposes only.

You may have recently decided to jump into the wonderful world of web marketing. You figured you'd show how cool you are by doing your own search engine optimization or pay per click management. As a result, you just set up your first online ad campaign and now you’re ready to sit back and reap the benefits of its inevitable success.

I'm sure that your new ad may be well placed and eloquently worded and is probably doing well. At least that's what I'd love to hope for you. In fact, there is no way of knowing how effective your campaign is without the ability to track its progress. More specifically, if you don’t specifically track what people do after they click on your ad then you'll not know how well your campaign is really doing.

Conversion tracking is the process by which you can track the performance of your ad campaign. Oftentimes people think that a conversion is simply making a sale. In actuality, a conversion is any time you can get someone to do something you want. This can be as simple as clicking onto another page or add something to a shopping cart.

The most common tool for monitoring conversion goals is Google Analytics. Fortunately, this is a free tool. Through Google Analytics conversion tracking, you can track the page that someone comes to from an ad campaign and then track where they go. If the goal is to click on a specific link, you can track the percentage of people that actually perform that action.

When you are tracking your visitors as they flow through your website, you have the ability to know how effective your ad campaign really is. So, if you are trying your hand at your own web marketing, make sure you take the time to set up some conversion goals and track the performance of your campaigns.

If you don't, you might be failing and not even know it.

For years you've known how important it is to be found in the search engines. If you have not found success increasing your rankings then you've probably wondered how to do it.

In my book, "Do It Right: A CEO's Guide to Web Strategy" I talk about the three components of SEO or search engine optimization being content, code and links. Since my book is strategic in nature, I don't spend a lot of time discussing what to do what that information.

There are some simple things you can do right now to help you on your way.

The way that search engines such as Google and Bing discover and rank your website changes regularly, so you want to make sure that you are always on top of the ever changing requirements. In recent years, search engines, Google in particular, have been placing an increased focus on fresh, relevant content on your website.

Here are three things you can do right now to help your search rankings.

• Blog regularly: (content) Writing regularly is one of the best ways that you can increase your visibility in a search engine. The more content you have, the more search engines will have to index. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to achieve regular content updating. Ensure that you are using relevant keywords that you want to be found for and blogging about topics relevant to your industry or target audience. Although this will not directly drive traffic to your website, it will create a greater likelihood that searchers will find your site for terms you had never considered.
• Fill out meta data: (code) Meta data, such as meta tags and meta descriptions, is extremely important. While Google has said they do not put as much of a focus on this information when ranking your website, it is still a very important component of SEO. Taking the time to add three to four keywords and a 150 character description to your meta information can help more than you might realize. In fact, if your site visitors share your content, the meta description is what LinkedIn and Facebook pull by default as the description for the page.
• Build Inbound Links: (links) Consider search engine optimization as a popularity contest. The more popular the page the higher in the rankings you'll find it. Inbound links to your website act as a vote from one website to another. Social bookmarking, online directories, and guest blogs are just a few of the ways that you can boost the credibility of your website in the eyes of Google.

You should understand that while search engine optimization is not meant to be a direct traffic generator it does generate traffic. You should consider your efforts in search engine optimization more like brand awareness. The more aware your audience is about you the more likely they are going to click on a link. The way you craft the title and the meta description will entice people to click through when they do find you in the search engines.

Start now by experimenting with new content. Write your content then monitor your rankings. If something doesn't work, try something new.

Since the beginning of time, businesses have started locally. When phone books started getting popular, it was common for new owners to name their businesses with the goal of appearing at the top of the white pages. As a result, you have companies that still have names that start with A, A1, A+, AAA, etc.

Today, marketing is a bit more complicated. Aside from the obvious that the best use for yellow pages is as fire starter or packing material, there are too many ways your listings are categorized to assume that A1 Boxers will just be at the top of the list because of the name.

Online, local search is still the most effective approach to getting found online you have. People want to do business with people in their neighborhood. That is especially true when it comes to services for their home, car, family, etc. When people are travelling, they'll do local searches (from their current location) for restaurants, stores, gift shops and convenience stores.

If your local web presence is not optimized your website may not be found by potential clients. If they can't find you online, they may never find you in your brick and mortar.

Having a local page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google is important. But also optimizing for sites such as Yelp and Foursquare can be a great way for our stores to be found. However, have you even considered local directories? Local directories pop up quite often and many of them are successful because they are very specific to their locale.

Some of the advantages surrounding submitting to local directories include:

• Higher Chance of Visibility - If nothing at all, being listed on a local directory will give you a higher chance of being seen by a potential customer. It isn’t exactly a profound statement to say that the more places you are listed on the web, the higher the chance that you will be seen. Take advantage of a free service and get listed.
• Gain Valuable Link Juice - The real benefit of being listed on a local directory is the gaining the link juice from the site. This has strictly to do with search engine optimization and is referring to how Google’s algorithm seeks to find the most relevant sites to include in their list of search results. The more credible sites that link to you, the better.
• Achieve a Higher Level of Credibility - Buying things locally went from a fad to a trend to a legitimate movement among consumers. Being listed on a local directory will ensure that people know that you’re a local entity. It will let consumers know that you are a legitimate business conducting a legitimate service.

When marketing your business, you should take the time to submit to as many local directories as you can. It's not overly complicated and likely free. It just takes time and the payoffs are worth it.